Archives

by Marcin Grajewski BRUSSELS, (Reuters) The European Union will turn into a modern Tower of Babel when it expands eastwards in 2004. Translation costs are bound to soar and the bloc's already complex administrative procedures risk linguistic gridlock.

EU institutions face a bill of hundreds of million of euros (dollars) for hiring some 1,800 new translators by 2008 as the number of official languages grows to 20 from 11 after the Union's biggest ever expansion.

The EU is already struggling to translate its 80,000 pages of laws, known as the acquis communautaire, into the languages of 10 candidate countries due to join in 2004, including Maltese, spoken by just 400,000 people.

Diplomats say the EU must pay the price to keep democratic control over its work and ensure that the often poor newcomers, mostly ex-communist countries from eastern Europe, do not feel like second-class citizens due to linguistic neglect.

"It is the democratic right of every member state to use its own language. This rule must be kept," said Eneko Landaburu, chief of the European Commission's enlargement office.

The issue is sensitive for many candidate countries, such as Poland and the three Baltic republics, which have a long history of enduring foreign dominance and treat their languages as the most potent symbol of national sovereignty.

An opinion poll in Latvia, where the Soviet Union imposed Russian as the everyday language for most of the 20th century, showed that more than 50 percent of citizens are afraid their language will be threatened by EU membership.

Those sensitivities may clash with a long-term need to slim down the EU's whole linguistic system, say analysts. The clear winner is likely to be English, which has already overtaken French and German at EU meetings.

EU institutions employ about 4,000 interpreters and translators, half of whom work for the Commission, the EU's executive arm. Their work cost taxpayers more than 800 million euros annually.

The Commission translates more than 1.3 million pages a year and offers interpretation at about 11,000 meetings.

It estimates that between 2003 and 2008 the EU needs to hire at least 1,800 extra translators and interpreters, a large part of the 3,800 overall staff requirement from new member states.

The cost is forecast to increase from several dozen million euros next year to 235 million euros in 2006, the last year of the EU's current budgetary period.

"This is a price worth paying to keep the democratic legitimacy of the EU," said Commission spokesman Eric Mamer.

"The cost of our language services now amounts to about two euros a year per person in the EU, and that will not change much after enlargement," he added.

EU expansion to take in the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004 will increase the bloc's population by some 75 million to a total of 450 million.

In practice, English is rapidly taking over as the main language, replacing French which dominated the EU for decades until the powerful Frenchman Jacques Delors stepped down as Commission president in 1995.

The turning point for English came with the EU's enlargement in 1995 to take in Finland, Sweden and Austria, whose diplomats refused to negotiate in French.

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries |

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager