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| Sunday, 9 May 2004 |
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A multilingual problem by Ian Black It is a drizzly Brussels afternoon, and Diemut Theato, a German MEP (Member of the European Parliament), is chairing the European Parliament's budgetary control committee, known to its intimates as Cocobu. The session is hearing candidates for membership of the European Union court of auditors. It is exactly the sort of ostensibly non-gripping stuff that, in reality, matters a lot; the people in this room, and those they are vetting as auditors, will be monitoring whether billions of euros of taxpayers' money have been properly spent. Although there are spare seats in the meeting room, the glass interpretation booths round the side are full. The arrangements on the ground floor are familiar; the German, English, French, Spanish and Italian linguists' teams, each three strong, curve round the wall, the booths numbered with German at 1, English at 2, ending up with the Finns and Swedes at 10 and 11. But above them are now nine additional sound-proofed booths, from Maltese on the left to Hungarian on the right. Turn the dial on the console in front of you to the number corresponding with the booth and you can hear the proceedings in any one of 20 linguistic renditions. This is the Babel that is the new Brussels - and Strasbourg, and Luxembourg, and wherever else the E.U.'s travelling circus finds itself. From May 1, when the Union mushrooms to 25 member-states and 450 million people, 20 languages will be in use (21 if Cyprus, with its Turkish minority, is miraculously reunited before then). Here at the Cocobu session - whose proceedings are the setting for a trial run of the full-blown new interpreting regime - not everything is going smoothly. Twenty languages with a three-person team for each means 60 interpreters for this committee meeting. But the Maltese, Slovaks and Poles have downed tools because their booths have no chairs. Annette Scerri, who has just flown in from Valetta, hopes these are just teething troubles. Two booths away, Marjana Rupnik is rendering into her native Slovenian the words of a ponderous Czech auditor candidate speaking in heavily accented English. Ms. Rupnik also interprets into German. Even before expansion, the E.U. was running the world's biggest system of conference interpreting, twice as big as the U.N.'s, its nearest rival, which uses just six languages. Next month's unprecedented big-bang enlargement will add nine new languages to the current 11, an increase of 82 per cent. Language is not just a technical matter, but one of cultural diversity and national pride. And there is a powerful democratic incentive for an E.U. that worries, rightly, about the distance between brussels and ordinary Europeans. In the European Commission, the Union's supranational executive, the fact is that English, French and to a lesser extent, German, are unofficially recognised as the "working languages" used for meetings and documents. The same is true at the Council of Ministers, where governments handle sensitive dossiers such as defence and foreign policy. Yet suggestions that life would be simpler, and administration cheaper, if everyone spoke English (the second language for most Europeans these days) are politically and practically unacceptable. "A foreign minister or a commissioner may be perfectly Anglophone, but we can't expect that from the specialist in lawnmower sound levels", explains Ian Andersen, a Danish official in the commission's interpretation directorate - upgraded, due to volume of work, from the mere department it used to be. When Ministers come to an E.U. meeting table, they get full interpretation into their own languages. (Denis Mac-Shane, Britain's Minister for Europe, who speaks French, German and Spanish, is both a national and a Europen exception). But polyglotism does not come cheap. Total costs after enlargement will soar to just under 1 billion euros a year, almost 1 per cent of the E.U. budget. At full cruising speed, all E.U. institutions will require 80 interpreters per language a day; half of those go to the European Parliament, whose needs are more rigorous. Imagine a Lithuanian at a meeting about fisheries policy. What he says will have to be translated into Czech - the language of a landlocked country - on the grounds that citizens of that member state might wish to read it. Or, if you've got just five Maltese MEPs, does it make sense to employ a full complement of interpreters in every meeting in the hope that one of the parliamentarians will turn up? With 20 languages, the number of possible combinations rises to 190 interpreting links. The solution to this is called relay, when speech in say, Estonian, is interpreted first into English, then into Greek, Slovak or Portuguese. It works, but it does mean a time lag: when the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, scandalously compared German MEP Martin Shultz to a Nazi concentration-camp guard last summer, it took several tantalising seconds before Mr. Shultz realised he was being insulted and yanked off his headphones in fury. Even if it resolves its dilemma over simultaneous translation in meetings, Brussels' multilingual headaches will not be at an end.(Guardian Newspapers Limited) |
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