Spain sees red on Brussels translation reshuffle
TERESA KÜCHLER
19.01.2006 @ 18:26 CET
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - A European Commission decision to reshuffle translators continues to aggravate Spanish MEPs, who say the move is political and goes against EU interests while the commission argues the matter is strictly organisational.
In a letter to education commissioner Jan Figel, Spanish socialist MEP Carlos Carnero Gonzalez points out that under the new deal, Spanish will be the most punished of all the 20 official community languages and evidently inferior to English, French and German.
All EU languages are equal but some are more equal than others. (Photo: European Commission)
Mr Carnero Gonzalez states that Spanish is the fastest growing language in the EU as well as internationally, with 500 million Spanish speakers in the world.
"The commission is making a huge political mistake. It does not look good for the EU image to cut down on Spanish, especially not ahead of the EU-Latin-American summit in May," he said.
Spanish translation staff for commission communication translations will be reduced from 101 to 67 during 2006.
The commission announced in December that in the future, general communication from the commission will be handled by the same amount of translators for each European language - between 65 and 70 - except for English, French and German.
French, German and English are "procedural" languages of the commission, meaning all internal documents as well as EU legislation must be issued in them.
The other 17 official EU languages have "official" status, meaning that only EU legislation must be translated into them.
Political issue
A spokesperson from the commission told EUobserver that the matter had mistakenly been turned into a political issue, when it was no more than an internal re-organisation, based on a simple evaluation of needs.
"It takes as many Hungarian or Slovak translators to translate a 15-page document from one of the working languages into their native language as it takes to translate it into Spanish," he said.
The contact added that Spanish translators will not diminish in number, but will be merely reshuffled under the new deal, expressing regret for erroneous media reports of redundancies.
"They will translate brochures, internet pages or other documents," he said.
A commission response to Mr Carnero Gonzalez' letter underlines linguistic equality between EU member states, saying that Spanish is in the same situation as any other EU official language.
Mr Carnero Gonzalez told EUobserver that no language is more important than the next.
"There is no first or second division, all languages are equally important," he stated, but pointed out that a small language like for instance Swedish "although beautiful" had a lot less speakers than Spanish and would consequently require fewer translators.
German the hot potato
English currently accounts for 60 percent of all internal commission memos, French 25 percent and German about 5 percent, with the latter causing annoynace to Spain.
"It is clear that the commission has chosen the most important member states' languages as working languages, without even considering the amount of people who speak them," Mr Carnero Gonzalez said, pointing at German as an incomprehensible choice for a working language.
The commission spokesperson said German had been one of the working languages since the early 1980s, and that no revision had been made in order to change the situation.
Each individual European Commission president decides which languages are given the special "working language" status, and none of the last three presidents have opted for a review.
The status of the Spanish language was discussed when Spanish prime minister Mr Zapatero met commission president Jose Manuel Barroso in December to talk about the financial perspective for 2007-13, with Mr Zapatero expressing a wish that "the Spanish language be present at the highest level in all the European institutions."