It seems that every
product you buy these days has to explain itself in every language
spoken in the EU zone. And then some. There's a story that a Senator
for one of the southern US states opposed the teaching of foreign
languages in schools on the grounds that “if English is good enough
for the Almighty, it's good enough for our children.”
I don't propose to go
quite so far, but it seems to me that it would be sufficient to give
product instructions in just 4-5 widely-taught languages: English,
French, German, Russian and Spanish, for example.
Icelandic? No
disrespect, but every Icelander learns English as school. Albanian?
Estonian? Lithuanian? Hungarian? Bulgarian? Catalan? Faroese? Occitan? Where do
you stop?
When I was an Expert
(official designation, not my vanity) for the Council of Europe, the
language problem was solved very simply: you had to be able to
understand three languages and be able to express yourself in one of
them: English, French, German. It was smooth and efficient. Now, I
suspect, in order not to “offend” anyone, the Council - and all
the other European organs - provide simultaneous translation in 23 or
more languages. What a waste of time and money!
I used to run an
English language school on the south coast. The Fire Advisory Office
said that the instructions for using a fire extinguisher had to be
posted next to the device in all the languages represented by the
students in the school. That meant at least twenty languages. By the
time a student found their language, they would have burned to death.
Another piece of bureaucratic nonsense.
All this ranting on my
part was provoked by my attempt to find out how to operate a digital
readout electronic weighing machine. Eighteen different languages I
think it was. Worst of all, each sentence/paragraph was translated,
so you had to trawl endlessly to find your little bit at eighteen
line intervals throughout the text. A complete load of bollocks, pardon my
French.
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