Less symbolic, more practical, says French Ambassador

In an enlarged European Union of 25 member states, the number of official languages will almost double from the current 11 to 21 languages. At present the official languages of the EU are English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Greek, Portuguese, Dutch and Danish.

By January 2004, when the first wave of up to 10 candidate countries could join as new member states, the EU could add up to another nine languages including Czech, Estonian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Slovakian and Slovenian. A further two languages could be added with the accession of Romania and Bulgaria some time after 2008.

The inclusion of Maltese among the EU's official languages was warmly welcomed in Malta. A language of Semitic origin and spoken by some 400,000 people (excluding emigrants), living on a small island state, has found its place at par with the other European languages. But is this issue of recognition of official languages by the EU a sheer exercise in satisfying patriotism of prospective member states?

"Nationalistic satisfaction has overshadowed completely the huge problems that such recognition of so many official languages that there are for all of us," commented French Ambassador Didier Destremau. "The increase from 11 to 21 languages will be exploding the cost of translators and interpreters."

According to EU figures, the European Commission has a staff of 1,300 translators employed in its Translation Service, representing some eight per cent of the Commission staff of 24,600. The Commission also sends out more than 20 per cent of its work to freelance translators.

Some 800 of these translators are based in Brussels and the rest work in Luxembourg at the EU's official publication unit. The Joint Interpreting and Conference Service (SCIC) provides interpretation for about 11,000 meetings held each year by the Commission, the Council of Ministers, the European Economic and Social Committee and the Committee of the Regions.

The SCIC employs about 700 interpreters each day, of whom roughly half are auxiliary (freelance) conference interpreters. The budget for translations and interpretations in an EU of 15 member states with 11 official languages was x687 million for 1999.

After enlargement, the European Commission will be recruiting some 110 extra staff for each new language in the field of translations. As for interpretations, there would be a need for 40 new interpreters per language, of which 20 should be permanent officials.

The European Parliament maintains the principle of multilingualism for all the debates with some restrictions. If the official languages increase to 21, it would mean that the cost for the European Parliament would go up to x521 million annually.

In a document published last December, the European Commission estimated that the cost of operating in the current 11 official languages, taking all the EU institutions together, is in the region of x800 million per year, which comes to x2 per EU citizen per year.

"All this cost will be borne by the citizens of the EU," Mr Destremau said. "The Maltese people must be aware of this. I was amazed that in Malta no one mentioned this problem."

According to a report by Jean Pierre Stroobants (Le Monde, July 3), some in Brussels are already calling for a better solution to the problem of languages, underlining that impracticality of having some 420 possible combinations among the 21 idioms of a future enlarged Europe.

"I think that one possible solution would be to have one or two or possibly three languages," the French Ambassador proposed. "But as soon as we put nationalism at stake, no one would be wanting to have one's language undervalued."

He added that another possibility is for EU citizens to accept the crisis and do nothing, and leave it until the multilinguist system cannot work any more. Another solution might be to select up to five languages.

In his feature, Stroobants recalled a proposal put forward by the Commission in 2001, and which was outrightly rejected by France and Germany. The Commission proposed that all proceedings in the EU should be conducted in the English language, discarding the other two "working languages" currently used in the EU, namely French and German. What the Commission had in mind was that all the political texts would be produced solely in English.

The President of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, recently said that the possibility offered to all the citizens to interact in their own language with the European institutions was "a fundamental prerequisite" for a democratic Europe.

Prodi was echoing what there is written in the EU treaties. Article 1 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) describes the EU as "an ever closer union among the peoples of Europe, in which decisions are taken as openly as possible and as closely as possible to the citizen".

And one way of doing this is by using the national language of the citizens. Besides, Article 6(3) of the TEU declares: "The union shall respect the national identities of its member states."

The national language is of course an important component of a country's national identity. Besides, Article 255 of the European Community Treaty states that "any citizen of the Union... shall have a right of access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents".

In order to maintain the national identity of member states and to make the EU ever closer to its citizens, the EU puts a lot of effort to ensure that the Community legislation is available to the citizens in their own languages, as a guarantee of equality before the law.

A study quoted by Stroobants in his Le Monde feature, conducted by two academics, one from the Free University of Brussels (Professor Victor Ginsburgh) and the other (Schlomo Weber) from the Southern Methodist University of Dallas, found that the English language was used by 208 million EU citizens, as their first, second or third language. The French language was used by 127 million EU citizens, followed by German (118 million), Italian (65 million), Spanish (56 million) and Dutch (24 million).

The same study by these two academics also found that if English were to be adopted as the EU's only official language, 45 per cent of the EU citizens would end up excluded linguistically.

While such a move would have some 20 per cent of the Swedes who would not understand English, the situation would be far worse in France where 58 per cent would feel linguistically excluded. In Portugal the percentage would reach some 65 per cent.

The two academics added that the 10 candidate countries from Eastern and central Europe are more oriented towards German and this could lead to strengthening of German as the second working language of the EU, surpassing French.

According to a recently published yearbook on candidate countries by Eurostat, over 30 per cent of students in secondary schools in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia study German as a foreign language.

The French Ambassador to Malta argued that, while it is true that the Maltese felt satisfied and proud for having their language recognised when other languages were not, it is also true that the Maltese language would hardly be used.

"Would a Maltese speaker in the institutions put symbol ahead of efficiency?" Ambassador Destremau asked. "Some official languages would not be used."

He augured that the Maltese people would be more intelligent "rather than stupidly nationalistic". In other words, faced with the impracticality of a multilinguistic system in the EU, "we have to be less symbolic and more practical".