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New Year for European Union On May 1, ten new countries joined the European Union. Those ten countries speak nine different languages. So the European Union now needs to translate all documents into a total of twenty different official languages. In August 2001, according to the British Broadcasting Company (BBC), translations were eating up 40% of the total administration costs for the European Union. Adding the nine new languages will only multiply those costs dramatically. The new price tag? In U.S. dollars, more than a billion dollars a year. And even worse is the logistical problems involved. It isn't just that German documents must be translated into English, but that German documents must be translated into the other 19 languages. As the BBC put it recently: "Twenty languages gives a total of 190 possible combinations (English-German, French-Czech, Finnish-Portuguese, etc.) and finding any human being who speaks, for example, both Greek and Estonian or Slovene and Lithuanian is well-nigh impossible." Yet when European Commissioner Neil Kinnock proposed translating most documents only into English, there was a tremendous outcry from other EU member countries. The French and German foreign ministers wrote that any move to "favour unilingualism in the European institutions" would be "unacceptable." Of course, it's far worse on this side of "the pond." As Jim Boulet, Executive Director of English First pointed out recently, "Keep in mind that, thanks to Clinton Executive Order 13166, the United States now requires translations not in 20 languages, but 300 or more." 
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The
ELPAC Report