EU moves to establish gibberish as lingua franca

Nice try...

Stop Press: EU WRITES LEGAL DOCUMENTS IN LEGAL LANGUAGE!

Register Journos Shocked:

Textual Detail Of International Treaty Is Difficult To Understand!

Give 'em a break. Compared to most international legal stuff, the EU treaties are a model of lucidity. Try this, from the Kyoto Protocol:

"If a question of implementation by a Party included in Annex I of the requirements referred to in this Article is identified in accordance with the relevant provisions of Article 8, transfers and acquisitions of emission reduction units may continue to be made after the question has been identified, provided that any such units may not be used by a Party to meet its commitments under Article 3 until any issue of compliance is resolved."

Besides, it's member countries like our own dear Britain (not "Brussels", whatever that means) who write the European treaties. And when you've got 27 governments wrangling for weeks over the precise positions of full stops and commas, legal "gibberish" is the guaranteed outcome. Better that than vague arm-waving and leaky prose.

(And "Brusselsese"? Please...)

Unbalanced tosh?

Are we reading the same article?

Irish?

More people in Ireland speak Chinese or Polish than Irish.

Many of the programs to promote Irish since 1922 have been actually killing Irish.

Which languages?

You don't list the languages that are included -- is it every known language including Welsh?

@Colin

You're making the classic mistake of double-counting language pairs. You count 22 pairs for, say, English, then 21 for French (because you've already counted French-English), then 20 for German (because you've already counted German-English and German-French), etc etc. Two seconds in a spreadsheet or several more with a calculator gives you 253 pairings between 23 languages.

@Colin Millar

because they don't need to be translated twice and they don't need to be translated to themselves

(23*23-23)/2 =253

and next - the countdown cunundrum

@Colin

23 x (23 - 1) / 2 = 253

-1 since we don't translate a language into itself

/2 to give the number of language pairs (ie English -> French, French -> English counts as 1)

I once met a very nice lady, who was doing simultaneous English <-> French for us. She is Danish married to a Portuguese, and is therefore one of the (very) few professional translators available for those two languages. I believe some of the more obscure language pairs have to go through an intermediate language, which can't improve the accuracy of the final result!

Way to go

Irish just recently became promoted as an official EU language, so they are still lagging behind with the translations of all the important documents.

Welsh, Catalan and other minority languages are not official EU languages, which is a shame, as translating EU documents significantly improves translation and language studies in all the small language groups. I come from Slovenia, which has a language with only 2 million speakers and in the past few years there has been a real explosion of translation jobs and a noticeable increase in the quality of work done.

@Chris

Usually in such circumstances they'll hire a capable individual and stick them in a language school for however long required. At least that's what the foreign office often do to when recruiting staff to work in countries with more obscure languages.

@Chris and Anonymous Coward #3

English (and sometimes French) are used as bridge languages by the EU since 2004, but only for simultaneous interpreting (in parliament, conferences, etc) - there aren't enough simultaneous translators trained in those languages. I don't think bridge languages are generally used for written documents, and certainly not for legal stuff.

In defence of the author -- to a point.

It is not europhobia to question the value of european documents.

The Kyoto protocol cited above reads to me like legalese. Joe's examples read like translations.

EU translations have a widely acknowledged problem: each translation must be utterly unambiguously identical to the original. This is essentially impossible. Translators will sometimes invent new words because they can't change the sentence structure for fear of changing meaning. Reading an EU document is not really reading "in your language", but it does generally provide the intended information very effectively.

However, Joe misses one vital point.

Anyone involved in translation knows this. Even undergrad language students know this. Which means the people that write this software will be more than aware of this.

Panic over -- move along -- nothing to see here.

Quid pro quo

Google are busy building a database of translation pairs using user submitted translation suggestions. If they're going to submit that corpus of texts to Google, they should also get a quid pro quo agreement from them.

We have major companies working in that field in the EU (e.g. Systrans) to release that body of text without a balancing agreement would tip the field in Googles favour.

i.e. we paid for it, make sure you get a balancing agreement before you go giving it away.

North America's problems...

At least we don't have too much of a problem here. Unfortunately, other languages creep into our country (it happens!). In many places we have "Spanish Subtitles" to stuff (I note it in banners in a couple of home improvement stores). Luckly there are only a few dominant languages: English (more rightly "american"), Spanish, and (luckly only ONE country has it as a sole language!) French. I suppose we are lucky.

Unfortunately, the French won't give up on their language being "pure", which limits things a bit. There will always be "The French"!

@Anonymous Coward

I see you everywhere, commenting on all sorts of stuff, defending authors ("to a point"). So, at a guess, you are working for el reg (or pr/marketing/publishing affiliate) in a management capacity, which demands the "Anonymous Coward" thing. Wrong?

xXx

@Hate2Register

Well in my case (I'm the one that defended the author... to a point) it's because I foolishly registered with my own name, thinking that was the done thing here.

Now I see the error of my ways, as these pages are filled with comments from pseudonymous accounts like "Hate2Register".

I can't see any account settings, so... aw heck -- why not go AC?