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Speakers of 23 different languages, I suspect. Which one do you chose? Would you presume to say that a single language is universal?

esperanto. Duh.

English is not universal but is the language a lot of people learn as a second language.

Though I would always prefer something spoken in my native language, I would prefer listening to a good English speech translated by a good human translator instead of listening a poor Spanish (my native language) speech translated by software... as the same article says, the software is far far from be near perfect.

I'm with you.

I'm Dutch, and I love my language, but the situation in the EU is bloody ridiculous. We should standardise on English. The end. I don't care what the French, Germans, or us Dutch think, I'm sick of hearing they spend MORE THAN ONE BILLION EUROS on translating alone. That's bloody retarded.

In fact, it's one of the two reasons why I consistently vote down anything related to Europe. The language issue clearly shows the inherent flaw of the EU: they pose as a supranational body, but in fact it's nothing more than a bunch of nation states acting like they like each other.

Standardise on English, and stop moving the EU government between Strassbourg and Brussels/Bruxelles twice a year. Then we'll talk.

It's a big number, but expressed as a fraction of the GDP of the EU, it's manageable. The IMF estimates that the EU GDP for this year will be 11.9 trillion Euros. The cost of translation is less than 1/10,000 of that figure.
If you think of the cost of translation as a tax on European goods and services, it is about 1/100 of one percent. And it gives a lot of people jobs.

Machine translation isn't even close to usable at this point: getting 70% of the words right means multiple errors in every sentence. The most it's good for at this stage is to speed up the work of a human translator, who can look at the original and the machine translation, fix the errors, and perhaps train the machine translation to improve (if the program allows for training).

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.

Did you ever factor in the cost or retraining and teaching everyone who don't speak or understand english into your nonsense ?

If the easy solution was to make everything english it would have been done a long time ago , But you know some people don't understand , write or speak in english , that's the majority of people in the EU by the way not the minority.

Spending 1 billion in translation is so intelligent that all european armed forces have seen there armed forces budget decline and there as never been in all of history such a long peace time between European country , mostly due to people figuring out that the other's where not insulting them because of translations.

The language issue is nonexistent and is not an issue at all , except for some idiot and racist. Who are trying to destroy it and point at it's flaws.

Apparently you understood nothing.
"Lernens Geschichte" [~ "Learn history"] as one of our politicans once said.

If you look at the facts a lot of people and countries of the EU profited. Countries that isolated themselves like Switzerland are falling behind.

When was the last war between members of the EU? Right more than 60 years ago, before there was even the EU. --> one of the reasons to found such body was that "incident".

Understanding each other is not retared, losing the connection with your citizens is.


What you are saying is that you want some kind of ancient Rome with one language, no matter if the people far away of Rome understand you or not. Imo one language would result in a system where everybody is "ruled" by "the EU", the perception would be worse than it's now.

Go on wasteing your votes without informing yourself.

Lets put it this way, all the new members of the EU have English as their official second language; so one can assume that they aren't the barriers. So basically it comes down to certain countries who speak a certain language who see 'sticking it to the English' as part and parcel with 'sticking it to the American's' by their refusal to speak English not only properly but at least put some effort into learning it in the first place.

Making English the standard for communication in business has already happened. Anyone remember in France the commotion made when a business leader said that English is a world language - get used to it? then in Luxembourg over the 'creeping in of English' into French? So I'm sure you can work out who the main instigators for derailing anything that resembles Anglo-Saxon.

One only need to look at the pathetic and juvenile reaction to economic reforms in France and labeling them as 'too anglo-saxon' to understand the immaturity one is actually dealing with. I can't believe that a country that spurred off the enlightenment with great thinkers is basically nothing more than a country of knee jerk reactionaries to anything from outside France.

Edited 2008-05-02 23:27 UTC

Let's see...

First, English is far from being the most widely spoken language in Europe: that'd be either French or German (Germany is now the most populated country in the EU, and French is spoken in four European countries, three of which are part of the EU).

Next, English is neither spoken by most people in Europe, nor easy to learn. In effect, making it the one official language in the EU would exclude most people from understanding what the various EU's bodies are saying. When such a thing happen, you haven't an union, you have an empire.

Having English the official EU's language has always been the wet dream of both the US and UK, and of a minority of people who can so put themselves above the unwashed masses.


Disclaimer: I'm French and an English teacher.

"Can't the EU simply mandate a common language?"

It's not part of the EU mandate and democracy as opposed to republic or monarchy can't impose on it's people from the top down , but rather the people must first mandate the EU to do so and they must vote in the favor of the application of a law on the subject.

"What's to stop them?"

The majority of the people in the EU. It's real easy to impose commercial and monetary changes , because it's the property of governement. It's another to try to impose languages most people don't know or use or understand.

Most of those who are against translations don't factor in that learning a new languages as a cost and that retraining all the people people into another languages is 1 trillion or more time higher then doing translations.

Good thinking, good thinking, my friend.. that would have to be German then, since it is the widest spoken language in the EU. We already tried to establish that ~60 years ago but the idea didn't exactly fly back then..