EU Translation Crisis Update

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According to this BBC article, the European Union translation backlog is becoming a serious problem. EU beaurocrats have been told to keep documents to fewer than 15 pages to help translators get caught up. According to the article:

    Prior to EU enlargement on 1 May, there was a backlog of 6,000 pages still awaiting translation — but with enlargement this problem has increased tenfold.

    With Estonian, Czech, Hungarian, Latvian, Maltese, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovak and Slovene now on the list of official EU languages there are an estimated 60,000 pages to plough through

Will English become the lingua franca of the EU? More than a few members are pushing for such a change, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. The European Union is a great experiment in pan-cultural unity; expecting countries to compromise on language would be asking a bit too much at this stage. And, as the French are quick to point out, why should the lingua franca of the EU be English?

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John Yunker

John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.
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