Eurodan in English

Who would have thought it? You can edit a blog on a web-TV!

I'm currently writing to you from my hotel room feeling very like the lost hero in Lost in Translation. But without the illicit love interest, so Bart needn't worry ;-)

I'm back on mission at the seaside, with the balcony window wide open and the waves lapping below as I look out over the North Sea. The sun is still dazzlingly bright and very warm, despite the cold wind.

And yet, I really don't feel like going out and exploring. For several reasons.

For one, I've had one too many restaurant meals, and so instead made myself a sandwich on my balcony. And secondly, we got yet another taste of the future today, and it doesn't look good for interpreters.

In all too many meetings these days, interpreters are hired and (at least in the English booth) prove to be unnecessary to the meeting. It seems that everyone can get by with a rough (and sometimes very rough) approximation of English these days. For us, patiently sitting in the English booth, there's little more despiriting than hearing a delegate, whose language you are more than ready and able to interpret into English, decide that he might as well just speak English himself, with varying degrees of success.

And there seem to be certain countries (naming no names but it's quite flat) who seem to be leading the charge against interpreting in the new, post-enlarged Europe. "After all, if we are speaking English so well, dere's no need for de translators, isn't it?"

Well, yes. I suppose we are an expensive luxury. We cost a couple of Euros a year per European citizen, and allow Europe's governments to send their best experts to meetings, rather than their best linguists.

Or so runs the official argument. But anyone who's ever spoken for themselves realises how much more satisfying it is to speak directly rather than through an interpreter. And everybody learns English these days, as lazy Brits of a certain type have been saying all these years.

Yes, it's time to abandon all the King Canute ideas about "getting under the skin of another culture". That's all very well for linguists, anthropologists and other wasters. What Europe's high-flying officials want to be able to do is read their Powerpoint presentations about gender mainstreaming targets to their thoroughly focussed, prioritised, switched-on colleagues. In English.

So here I am, enjoying the sunset, literally and figuratively. In a curious parallel with Winston Smith writing at the start of 1984, I tap away on this telescreen to write a greeting from the already (professionally) dead, or at least to say that the end is nigh. Rather like the copy typist, the typesetter, the miner or myriad other professions which were overtaken by irresistable forces.

Still, it is a very beautiful sunset. And the work will probably last a few more years.

Posted by Eurodan at June 14, 2004 8:56 PM