Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 2nd May 2008 20:52 UTC, submitted by irbis
In the News One of the biggest problems facing the European Union today is the fact that within its borders, 23 languages are spoken. This means that all the important documents have to be translated by a whole army of translators, which costs the taxpayer more than 1 billion Euros a year - and companies trading within the EU spend millions more. The EU-funded TC-STAR project aims to tackle this issue with technology: a system that eats speech in one language, and outputs that same speech in another.
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RE[2]: What's the problem?
by Terracotta on Fri 2nd May 2008 22:54 UTC in reply to "RE: What's the problem?"
Terracotta
Member since:
2005-08-15

So, you basically want that only highly educated people get elected?

Then there's the problem of giving one country a language advantage in negotiations because they're language is the "universal" lingua franca.

In my opinion Esperanto would work much better. First, not that many people do speak it well enough to start diplomatic and political negotiations in as many would like to think. second everybody has the same chances, a second non foreign language to negotiate in.

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