Too many languages could kill multilingualism if nothing is done

Version française

European Union issues every day its legislation in the 23 official languages with three different alphabets. Well done! This represents a huge textual asset of aligned, structured, parallel texts carefully prepared by politicians, lawyers and linguists. It is a mandatory burden if we consider citizens must be able to understand the law in their own language.

The global multilingualism’s cost (written translation and oral interpretation) is estimated at more than 1000 million euros for all the Institutions. The European court of Auditors published in 2006 a special report concerning expenditure incurred by the Commission, the Parliament and the Council together with the Institutions’ replies. (before the enlargement to 23 languages)

See European Court of Auditors (ECA)

With all this linguistic knowledge corpus, it could be great to develop and to promote everywhere in Europe tools to facilitate the authoring, translation and publication processes of parallel texts such as multilingual websites, tutorials, guides, extracts …

Of course this kind of development must be done on an interoperable Open Architecture base as supported by the Commission (IDAbc) to avoid proprietary slavery of software editors.

Would it not be up to the Commission to launch such a project if we consider the huge advantages for the citizens, civil society ans small and medium size enterprise (SME).

The “authoring-translating-publishing” software tool would be disseminated with “copyleft” (to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions of a work for others and requiring that the same freedoms be preserved in modified versions. A widely used and originating copyleft license is the GNU General Public License. Similar licenses are available through Creative Commons - called Share-alike.)

Sources:

Context ____________________

European Court of Auditors, Special Report No 9/2006

European Parliament, Committee on Budgetary Control, Working document

on Special Report No 9/2006 of the European Court of Auditors concerning

translation expenditure incurred by the Commission, the Parliament and the Council

Download Translation_EP_COCOBU_643388en.pdf

Commission: Commissioner Leonard Orban in charge of multilingalism

Forum on Multilingualism : http://forums.ec.europa.eu/multilingualism/

Effects on the European Economy of Shortages of Foreign Language Skills in

Enterprise

A significant amount of business is being lost to European enterprise as a result of lack of languages skills. This report, commissioned by the Multilingualism Policy Unit and undertaken by CILT (the UK National Centre for Languages) in collaboration with InterAct International and an international team of researchers, provides practical information and analysis of the use of language skills by SMEs and the impact on business performance.
Full report
Summary

EurActiv about Multilingualism (Search results)

EurActiv about Translation: Cost in translation - expense awareness 'duty to taxpayers'[fr][de]

Sources: linguistic and technical matters ____________________

« Dragoman » paper (not yet published paper, privatly communicated)

Euramis: presentation of the project : Download euramis_Presentation_2007_03.ppt

Translation center: Download CDT_EU_Functional_Specs_Translation_Portal.doc 

Interinstitutional Translation Portal , Draft functional specifications (Con this paper is the fact that it considers only the translation tasks, only focused for EU Institutions)

Multilingual indexation

Mathematical models for the indexation of European Legislative Documents

Multilingual thesauri

A multilingual thesaurus covering the fields in which the European Communities are active / un thésaurus multilingue couvrant tous les domaines de l'activité de l'Union européenne : Eurovoc

Multilingual glossaries

The following glossary contains 233 terms relating to European integration and the institutions and activities of the EU /  Le glossaire présente 233 termes relatifs à la construction européenne, aux institutions et activités de l'Union européenne : http://europa.eu/scadplus/aboutglossary_fr.htm

A pity: only available in 11 languages and impossible to reuse it (not interoperable)

Multilingual terminology

Inter Active Terminology for Europe: : IATE 

Localization Industry

The Localization Industry Standards Association http://lisa.org

http://www.multilingual.com/

http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/

http://www.cilt.org.uk/index.htm

See also http://europa-eu-audience.typepad.com/en/2007/10/say-almost-the-.html

Comments

[Bartolus]

Official Languages, No Translation, No Enforceability: Case C-161/06

Now here is a curious case ! In its judgment in Case C-161/06 Skoma-Lux the Court of Justice held that the obligations contained in EC legislation which has not been published in the Official Journal in the language of the member State in which enforcement is sought cannot be enforced in that State.