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Should English be the official language? | ||
Tags: Language Politics | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4534 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes  Studies: German | Message 49 of 96 29 April 2013 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Sorry for my embarrassing mistake re: Iceland. But the main point remains: If you are in Brussels, English and French (and German?) are really useful/necessary languages, but Lithunian, Lativian, Czech, etc are not going to be so helpful. So there is a form of de facto linguistic dominance already being exerted within the EU. So it seems to be just a question of whether you want to narrow things down to one language, or a handful of the more powerful nations. Edited by patrickwilken on 29 April 2013 at 3:30pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 50 of 96 29 April 2013 at 3:33pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Dutch is pretty useful in Brussels too. But I assume you meant for the EU parliament,
outside of that case Dutch is only useful for the Flemish and the capital region government (which are both somehow in Brussels), and for many companies of course. Edited by tarvos on 29 April 2013 at 3:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4534 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 51 of 96 29 April 2013 at 4:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Yes. I meant Brussels = EU, not Brussels = beautiful city with interesting food etc. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Presidio Triglot Newbie United States Joined 4582 days ago 39 posts - 150 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, German Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Gulf) | Message 52 of 96 30 April 2013 at 10:00pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The article states that the EU spends roughly 300 Million Euros a year on interpretation/translation services, employing between 2000 and 3000 translators.
That comes out to OVER 820,000 EUROS EACH DAY in translation costs. Or over 13,000,000 Euros a year for EACH of the 23 member nations. 820 thousand Euros A DAY in transaltion services is INSANE. (And that is pretending they operate 365 days a year. When you remove holidays and regularly scheduled closed days, the cost per day is actually much higher.) The simplest solution for the EU would be to follow the lead of the United Nations. The UN represents over 190 countries and does so carrying out their business in just six official languages. Surely the EU - with a fraction of the countries represented - could get by on just 3 or 4. Perhaps English, German, French, and Spanish. While some nations would of course feel 'slighted,' I would simply point out that if it is good enough for handling world affairs at the UN, it should be fine for handling European affairs at the EU. Personally, I feel the EU operating in one single language would be more cost effective. And if people were honest they would admit that English would likely be the best choice. It seems likely that almost every single country in the EU already has internal resources that would allow them to function at press conferences held in English and translate documention and press releases issued in English by the EU. That would save a tremendous amount of money and resources for the EU itself. Still, someone is going to kick and scream so it will never happen. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 53 of 96 30 April 2013 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
...with my cynicism reminding me that it'll find some other way to blow those resources (like soaking up more bad mortgages, maybe? >:-)). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Romanzo Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4305 days ago 15 posts - 23 votes Speaks: Italian, English* Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, French | Message 54 of 96 30 April 2013 at 11:21pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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If they did do this then they should go to six, rather than one languages. They would
probably be the six most spoken languages of Europe; being in order: -English -German -French -Italian -Spanish -Polish 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 55 of 96 01 May 2013 at 9:39am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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If EU dropped its language service the quality of Google translate might decline due to the resulting scarcity of bi/multilingual input texts. That would be sad.
3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6152 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 56 of 96 01 May 2013 at 10:08am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I wonder if the €300 million figure already includes the money spent, by each government, translating documents into their national languages. If this is the case, then reducing the number of languages, won't make much of a saving. Most, if not all, members of the EU are required to conduct business and draft laws in their national languages. 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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