EU: Spanish degraded, German 'an incomprehensible choice'

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The European Commission has recently decided to reorganise EU translation service, leading specifically to a reduction of translators employed for Spanish. Spanish members of European parliament (MEPs) in protests say the move is political and goes against EU interests, EUObserver editor Teresa Küchler writes.

In a letter to education commissioner Jan Figel, Spanish socialist MEP Carlos Carnero Gonzalez points out that Spanish is the language most 'punished', reducing the staff from 101 to mere 67 linguist, and objects the inferior status to English, French and German. Mr. Gonzalez argues that Spanish deserves better as it is the fastest growing language in the EU as well as internationally, with 500 million Spanish speakers in the world.

The EC 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, which are "procedural" languages of the commission, meaning all internal documents as well as EU legislation must be issued in them.

The other 17 EU languages have "official" status, which requires only EU legislation to be translated into them.

Küchler writes that a spokesperson from the commission pointed out that the whole 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.

English currently accounts for 60 percent of all internal commission communication, French 25 percent and German about 5 percent, with the latter causing annoyance to Spain, Küchler writes. "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.

Here, however, Mr. Gonzales is misguided. As a matter of fact, Germany is the largest country in the European Union by population, thus German native speakers make up 24 percent of the EU population, as the EU website informs. This makes German the most widely spoken mother tongue on the continent. Together with the 8% of the population speaking German as a second language, German, which 32 percent of the EU population are capable of conversing in, is, after English (47%), ranked second in list of languages spoken by the total proportion of European citizens followed by French(28%) and Italian (18%). Spanish is ranked fifth with 15 percent of EU citizens speaking it (11% native speakers + 4% non-native speakers).

Sources: EUObserver.com, EU Statistics: Languages in Europe

Related: EU to reduce linguists to hire new ones