Spur to long overdue action

Your report (June 20) about the gross mistakes in the official Maltese translation of the draft Constitution for Europe submitted to the European summit in Greece makes for unhappy and painful reading.

We at the Institute of Linguistics have to struggle every day with the mentality that everybody can be a linguist when it comes to the scientific study of language, a perception fuelled by the fact that everyone is the native speaker of at least one language and therefore "knows" something about it, whereas no one who has not specifically studied say, physics or medicine, will claim a competence in these areas.

One could see this mentality at work at the recruitment meeting at the Aula Magna, Foundation for International Studies, Valletta, called some months ago by European Commission personnel for all those potentially interested in doing freelance translation into Maltese of EU documents.

In the packed hall, besides undergraduate students of Maltese, one could also see people from all walks of life, whose only justification for being there was presumably that they spoke (and sometimes wrote - this is doubtful in the case of many) the language.

One corollary of this mentality follows: since everybody is more or less an expert, why squander useful funds on training translators? Indeed, the Faculty of Law, as is known, removed A-Level Maltese as an entrance requirement.

Almost two years ago, government sources asked the university to look into the possibility of setting up a (postgraduate) course in translation and interpretation, a request duly passed on to us at the Institute of Linguistics.

We studied the possibilities carefully, also in the light of what is happening in the field internationally (not only in terms of the institutions of the EU but also of the UN) and duly presented our report.

Among other things, we had to say clearly that the setting up of such a course would cost money. Not only are the translation and interpretation professions heavily unionised abroad, but they are also highly paid.

Our fear was that many would think the recruitment of expatriate professionals in the initial period for the setting up of the course would be frivolous, since not many can even appreciate the distinction between translation and interpretation.

The report was duly passed on to the government sources which had originally requested it by our cash-strapped university and the response, despite a repeated number of reminders, was a deafening silence. Your report shows clearly that the chickens have come back home to roost.

Incidentally, the proposal by the Board for Maltese, set up by the Minister of Education some years back, which reached parliament in the form of a White Paper in the last administration, representing the widest consensus ever achieved by all stakeholders in the field, provides for the setting up of a National Council for Maltese to approach language planning questions like the one under consideration (there are many others) in a comprehensive as opposed to a piecemeal fashion.

It is heartening to see that the government intends to carry on with this effort and that this latest unfortunate incident will act as a further spur to long overdue action by our decision makers.

Prof. Borg is chairman, Institute of Linguistics.