EU language barrier "costing lives"
July 28, 2004
This article in the Guardian today tells us that
Doctors in some of the world's poorest countries are being denied cheap life-saving drugs for patients because Brussels lacks enough linguists to translate a new patent law into the 20 languages of the European Union.
Now I can understand it is a complex process, but there are lots of reputable translation agencies out there that are perfectly able to handle such a project, and actually do it day in, day out. Why not involve one of them instead of delaying such an important piece of legislation? And anyway, didn't EU officials realise that with 20 languages to deal with, it would be a good idea to put in place an efficient translation department able to ensure everything was going to work smoothly?
Have you ever taken a look at how many translation departments the different EU bodies actually have? I can tell you, they have a lot of them. Nevertheless they are not able to handle all the work that has to be done. I can imagine that in the long run this will probably lead to a differentiation between "official languages" and "spoken languages", and that official documents will only be translated into the official languages. I know that this is completely against EU's policy of respecting all cultures and languages of all Member States, but as the EU grows bigger and bigger some sacrificies will probably have to be made. Not that I am supporting this... but I don't actually see how they want to tackle all the work without such restrictions.
Posted by Sonja Tomaskovic on July 28, 2004 10:05 AMPrevious: July 27, 2004
Using Google 2 >>
Next: July 30, 2004
<< Translation and the FBI