Friday, February 20, 2004

Translation costs for the European institutions will soar by euro 258 million to euro 808m per year when the EU takes in ten new members in May.

Brussels today spends euro 550m on translating EU documents into eleven languages -- and spiraling costs post-enlargement will account for a further nine: Latvian, Estonian, Czech, Maltese, Hungarian, Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and Slovenian.

Interpretation costs will rise from euro 105m in 2003 to euro 140m per year after enlargement of the Union. ... The volume of translation texts will increase by 40 per cent and 110 additional translators are needed for each of the languages. ...

The EU's translation service, located in Brussels and Luxembourg, is the largest in the world, with a permanent staff of 1,300 linguists and 500 support staff.

It's not so much that Francophones themselves can't take a joke, but that the bien-pensant Anglos who police English Canadian culture don't want to risk letting them be put in the position of having to take a joke, lest it tear the country apart. There's a lesson here, both for the European Union and an increasingly Hispanicized U.S.: Gags are one of the great pillars of a common culture, but they're one of the first things to get lost in translation--and if you can't share a joke, it's hard to have a shared culture. That's why multilingual societies tend toward the humorless: see Switzerland and Belgium. (For the purposes of the preceding racist generalization, I should point out that I'm half-Belgian.)