Words worth their price for open and democratic Union

Date: 11/04/1996

IF you were brought up in Finland by a Greek father and a Slovak mother, the European Union could offer you great job prospects in the coming years.

For when the Union opens its doors to let in up to 12 more countries, the search for interpreters and translators with unusual combinations of languages will become a pressing priority.

Whatever happens, the EU's political masters agree that it would be politically impossible to limit the number of official Union languages, despite suggestions from some quarters that it should consider doing so.

“The European Union is not like bodies such as the Council of Europe, which is an intergovernmental body. The EU is supranational and so documents should be in the members' mother tongues. It's an absolutely unique beast, a one-off,” claims an experienced member of the Commission's translation service.

The Council of Europe, with 39 members stretching from Manchester to Moscow, publishes its documents in English and French only. Interpretation may be permitted into other languages including German, Italian, Spanish and Russian, but additional services must be paid for by the government of the country in question.

However, linguists in the EU's institutions are quick to refute arguments that their services are becoming too great a drain on the budget.

They point to former Commission President Jacques Delors' belief that multilingualism is a price which has to be paid for a truly open and democratic Union. Anyway, they argue, at 2&percent; of the overall budget, the linguistic services are cheap at the price. “It's not bad when you think how much depends on us!” said one.

The last enlargement of the EU to include Austria, Sweden and Finland not only firmly established German-speakers as the biggest single language group in the Union, but also provided the greatest test so far of the linguistic resources available.

“Finnish is extremely difficult,” comments one translator with admirable understatement.

A total of 33 interpreters are now required at meetings of the Council of Ministers to tackle the 110 different linguistic combinations possible in a 15-member EU with 11 official languages.

In a Union of 20 member states, the number of linguistic combinations possible would rise to more than 300, with at least 60 interpreters needed to handle them all.

Quite apart from the logistical and financial problems this entails (experiments have already been carried out to see whether four interpreters could be crammed into each booth), many wonder whether the institutions will have a sufficient pool of sufficiently qualified young graduates to choose from.

“We are already touring the countries of Central and Eastern Europe looking for talent, but we are aware that we cannot be seen to be training anybody before countries join, so as not to pre-empt any decisions on membership,” said a senior official from the interpretation service, recalling that provisions were already being made for Norwegian interpretation before the first enlargement in 1973.

Few rooms in the brand new Justus Lipsius Council building have enough booths to accommodate the number of interpreters needed now, let alone any more. Officials fear a motivation problem if conditions for interpreters become too cramped.

Technology offers possible ways of interpreting at a distance, and a task force is already looking into the possibilities. But officials sound a word of warning. “The non-linguistic side is very important for us, seeing how the delegate and the audience are reacting,” said one.

While the number of official languages will continue to increase as the Union gets bigger, an element of pragmatism has already crept into the system.

Since the start of 1995, journalists have been allowed to ask questions at the Commission's daily briefing in English as well as French. This came as a great relief to all those tired of hearing anglophone journalists murdering the French language, but the change was not won without great resistance from the French-speaking contingent.

During sessions of Coreper, the Committee of permanent representatives, delegates may still speak their mother tongue, but interpretation will generally be into the 'big three': French, English and German, although one official said: “We never admit that this is an official policy, because that would be politically difficult.”

Additional languages may be made available depending on the need, with the mix being determined by the subject matter. A different range would, for example, be offered for meetings on fishing policy in the Baltic and the Mediterranean.

The services try wherever possible to avoid what is known as “relay interpretation”, famously operated by the Comecon Soviet-led trade bloc, which translated everything into Russian and then on into each individual language.

“Mathematically, relay interpretation doubles the risk of mistakes.”

Even the use of just a core of working languages cannot avoid some of the natural pitfalls caused by the niceties of language.

Anglophone officials in the Special Committee for Agriculture still remember their horror when it was suggested a compromise could be found by applying “sagesse Normande”, fearing that the ageing British comedian Norman Wisdom could do little to break the impasse.

Similarly, a veterinary meeting was not convinced that the best way of impregnating a cow was through the use of “matelots gelés” rather than “frozen semen”.

With the advent of Finns and Swedes, the translation service has already expanded, although 20&percent; of the work is now done by freelances. Some of them work from home, not least because the institutions have trouble enticing people to the grey of Brussels from the altogether fresher air of the Nordic countries.

Contracting-out of work has raised questions of quality, with many doubting whether it is possible to translate complex legal texts without access to detailed background documentation.

Eduard Brackeniers, Director-General of the Translation Service, admits “this is a very sensitive subject among my people”. But he adds: “I believe it can be done in part at a distance.”

Some in his department, however, fear the loss of the all-important “corporate culture”. Already translating more than a million pages of text a year, the service is being forced to look for ways to cut corners.

Brackeniers accepts the need for absolute quality in the translation of legal texts, but suggests that machine translation might be sufficient to gain the basic meaning from background documents.

A great deal of research is going on within DGXIII (the Directorate-General for information and telecoms) into the possible use of technology to ease the burden on the language services, although officials suggest designing a programme for linguistic tasks “is probably the most difficult task of all for computers”.

Comical examples abound of the difficulties faced by the Commission's “Systran” translation programme. Recent machine translations had Jacques Delors asking “permission to expose himself to the committee”, and industrialists “passing water into the public supply system”.

On one occasion, the machine translated “les agriculteurs vis-à-vis de la Politique Agricole Commune” as “farmers live to screw the Common Agricultural Policy”.

When EU leaders adopted the idea of pursuing the “information society” at the Corfu summit, there was concern about what this might mean for the diversity of languages and culture throughout the Union.

Since then, efforts to take multilingualism beyond the decision-making process into the high-tech world of multi-media have been redoubled. Apart from the philosophical arguments, officials see this as a means of creating a large number of jobs in highly-skilled sectors.

Brackeniers is unconvinced by arguments that translation work could be devolved to each directorate-general individually, suggesting this would increase numbers and prove difficult to organise. But his staff are aware that it will be very difficult to persuade colleagues in the various directorates-general to change their way of thinking as long as theirs remains a free service.

Although it would be dangerous to ask the rest of the Commission to pay for the service, Brackeniers points to the approach adopted for the Luxembourg-based European Translation Agency - established to translate documents for the various specialist agencies such as the European Environment Agency - as a possible way forward.

“It's a revolution. For the first time, EU agencies are paying for translation. We need more experience, but maybe we have found a way to maintain multilingualism,” says Brackeniers.

A less extreme revolution would involve persuading Commission staff to moderate their demands and cut the number of documents they send for translation.

But on one thing all are agreed: the translation service is one area which has benefited greatly from the Santer Commission's policy of “doing less, but better”.