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Eurocracy: Lost in translation

Published time: June 14, 2012 04:10
Edited time: June 14, 2012 08:27
Angela Merkel and Luxembourg's Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker (Reuters / Francois Lenoir)

Members of the Lower House of the German Parliament, the Bundestag, are struggling to figure out what some EU papers might mean. Lots of badly translated documents are regularly sent back to Brussels, slowing down political work.

­Approximately one hundred important EU documents have been sent back by the Bundestag committee in the current legislative period alone, the Saarbrücker Zeitung newspaper reported on Tuesday. Crucial decisions have to be postponed amidst Europe's debt crisis, while the relevant documents circulate between Berlin and Brussels marked as a "consultation obstacle."

Flawed translations appear to be an obstacle for a whole range of issues. They have slowed the work of the Interior, Finance, Budgetary, Economic, and Defense Committees in the German parliament. To make things worse, the German versions of the documents are often not included at all.

The European Commission has been promising a new translation strategy, says the paper, citing the chairman of the Bundestag Europe Committee, Gunther Krichbaum, adding that “nothing has happened.”

German MPs are due to discuss the problem on Thursday. They are likely to demand that the European Commission allocates sufficient resources to improve the quality of translations – an optimistic expectation given that thousands of officials are already devoted to translating documents at an annual cost of hundreds of millions of euros.

The European Union conducts its paperwork in 23 languages.

Comments (14)

SPARKS7366 (unregistered) 05.10.2012 15:14

Maybe they should all learn to speak German so there would not be any delays in the translation department!

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dandelion13 (registered) (unregistered) 14.06.2012 18:46

"Members of the Lower House of the German Parliament, the Bundestag, are struggling to figure out what some EU papers might mean." - this truely is false, because we know of no one in the Bundestag who has ever tried to read anyone of them. Totally independant from any matters of speech or translation even the papers are by design not intended to be understandable, but the rather absolute contrary of that. Actually this does NOT, I repeat it does NOT hinder the political progress of the EU, but again it does the absolute contrary: by no one being able to tell what the EU-Commission does at the end of day, no one cries out against them -what we all shall do to stop them from further on selling the last remains of our peace, property and purpose to their corrupted lords in the industries.
Even should be added, that it requires much more than transparency and uncovering of what the EU-Commission does with the money Europeans give them. It requires the demand for that to be read, understood and discussed and even denied on the side of our national representators and therefor ourselves in the first place to create and empower such representators on our own.
The actual political class of course blames the EU. They are blaming others all the time to draw attention away from the simple fact of their own poor function, which only lies on another level of management, but is not different from what is done in the Commission. This is the danger and struggle Europeans are now dealing with.

 

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Dimitri (unregistered) 14.06.2012 14:50

SPRINGTIME FOR MERKEL

It's Springtime for Merkel and Germany.
It's Winter for Rajoy and Spain.
Bailouts are moving at a faster pace.
Lookout, here comes the master race.

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