Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 2nd May 2008 20:52 UTC, submitted by irbis
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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Member since:
2005-08-15
What's wrong with English? Only a minority of people speak it well enough to really communicate. A lot of people recognise a lot of stuff when they hear it, but they have more problems creating their own English sentences. It may be that in Business it's the standard, but even there, it's mostly only the highly educated people that use this so called universal de facto lingua franca. So introducing it as a second language would be as artificial as introducing Esperanto, it would give advantage to one part of the EU when it comes to political negotiations, something one wouldn't want at all, and it is a lot harder to learn. Esperanto was created for just that, a language to use as a second language, not as a native one. This way every culture gets the same treatment and respect as it's neighbour culture.