Opinion: Drowning in the EU's Tower of Babel

A huge crest of paperwork is rolling towards the European Commission, threatening to swamp the 25,000 civil servants working in Brussels. Last year, the arduous bureaucrats churned out more paper than ever before: 1.5 million pages had to be translated into what were then the 11 official EU languages. Now the translators are sinking in the vast ocean of work backing up behind them. At last count, they were 60,000 pages behind, and if the momentum continues at the same pace, that could soon increase to 300,000.

Keep it short!

The EU wants to drastically reduce the flow of work to be translated, and has issued an edict instructing beavering bureaucrats to reduce the length of "memorandums" -- the official title for Commission texts -- from the current average of 50 pages to a mere 15.

"Keep it short!" is the new motto among the Brussels insiders, a throwback to the days of public telephone boxes long before mobile phone become a mainstream play thing. Each year the pile of papers grows by about five percent. And EU Commissioner Neil Kinnock admits that if things continue as they are, it will be the death of the translation department.

Already, the translation department is the biggest single EU installation. More than 2,400 translators transfer their colleagues' warblings into the now 20 official languages, from Finnish to Maltese to Slovenian. Although the number of translators working there was upped with expansion at the start of May, the EU personnel department didn't manage to get enough qualified staff onboard in advance of expansion. Despite seven years of planning, there were apparently not enough qualified translators available, or at least that is the line Commissioner Kinnock is sticking to.

Language acrobats

Rather than take on hundreds and hundreds of extra translators, the plan is to increase the productivity of the translation service by 40 percent by the end of 2006. Internal working papers are now only translated into English, French or German, but everything that leaves the building to go to citizens, companies or courts has to be translated -- and precisely.

Some of the new member states have already started grumbling that their language is not taken seriously enough by the Commission. And in some places, the Internet presence of the nine new languages could serve to back their complaints. The language acrobats back at base, however, claim this is only a transitional phase.

But in 2007, Bulgarian, Rumanian and maybe even Croatia will join the swelling linguistic ranks of the Union. With a couple of years warning, there is ample time for the Commission to go in search of translators who can work, let's say from Estonian into Turkish. If Turkey were to join the EU at some point over the next ten or 15 years, it's high population would mean it brought with it one of the most widely spoken languages. It is not only the Commission, but also the other institutions, such as the European Council, the parliament and the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg with massive translation departments. And they, too, are feeling the force of the surging workload.

Flood on the horizon

The next floods are already gathering strength on the horizon. Spain is currently applying to have Catalan, Galician and Basque recognized as official EU languages. If accepted, it wouldn't mean that everything had to be translated into these languages, but Catalans, Galicians and the Basques would have the right to approach EU organs in their mother tongue, just as the Irish can already do in their traditional Gaelic.