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On a global scale French is perhaps one of the most respected languages; this language which is so fiercely protected both on the continent and overseas has long been used in diplomacy, gastronomy, viticulture and fashion and is the primary language used by a number of important international organisations such as the Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières. However, as the use of languages such as English, Mandarin and Arabic becomes more and more widespread, should French take a back seat?

Both in Francophone Canada and in France itself the battle to protect the French language from foreign interference is ongoing. However, some native French speakers believe that it is time to break down these linguistic barriers and relax the legislation put in place to protect their native language. These francophone citizens are proud of their language and its global prestige, but these are also people who recognise the importance of linguistic diversity.  France’s Higher Education Minister Genevieve Fioraso recently introduced a controversial bill that would allow certain lectures at French Universities to be taught in English, this was proposed with the intention of attracting a higher number of students from the BRIC countries, thereby improving the international reputation of some of France’s most prestigious universities. This new legislation would be an amendment to a law passed in 1994 which stated that teaching and lecturing should only be done in French, except in the case of foreign language training or visiting professors. The new bill has divided French academics, the Académie Française was quick to dismiss the proposed legislation and published an open letter listing the negative impact that such changes could have, whilst a collective of supporters of the bill (comprising Nobel Prize winners and leading French business figures ) published another letter in Le Monde outlining the benefits of teaching in English. One important factor highlighted by the latter was the dominance of English in the field of science, the group expressed concern that teaching students in French alone could reduce opportunities for home students in multinational organisations.

The global popularity that the English language has experienced over recent decades in undeniable: science is only one of many fields in which the language is prevalent. The influence of English is nothing new, it has been an official language for influential organisations including the UN and the EU for many years, so perhaps the French are right to protect their language from anglo-interference. However, it is one of a handful of languages which are growing in numbers of native and non-native speakers, Mandarin, Arabic and Spanish are all becoming increasingly influential. The importance of these languages is illustrated in the Economist’s ‘Johnson’ blog, which discusses language use. The article ‘Languages of diplomacy: Towards a fairer distribution’ suggests that Spanish might be a suitable potential successor to French as an official language at the UN; not only are there a higher number of Spanish speakers in the world (410 million people, compared with 220 million French speakers), they also represent a wider demographic. The same applies to Arabic, which is spoken in a wide number of countries; however, it is the keen interest that Latin American countries have shown in international affairs that sets Spanish apart as a more influential language. For example, unlike the majority of countries where Arabic is the primary language, nearly all Spanish-speaking Latin American countries claim membership at the UN-affiliated International Criminal Court.

The Economist is not the only publication to have noted the increasing influence of the Spanish language, a recent article published in the Spanish national newspaper El Pais entitled ‘‘Excusez-moi’, deje sitio al español’ (Excusez-moi, leave room for Spanish) suggested that French should play a lesser role in diplomacy and European politics and allow Spanish to be used more frequently. Of course, this is unlikely to happen in the near future given the historical use of French for diplomatic matters, however, Francisco Moreno Fernández, academic director of the Instituto Cervantes (The Spanish Government body which promotes the study and teaching of Spanish) has set his sights on what could be a more achievable goal (sorry)- UEFA. Moreno Fernández said that “Given the space that Spanish football occupies in Europe and the ample understanding that its professionals show of our language, it is shocking that the official languages of UEFA are English, French and German and not Spanish. It would be more than reasonable for the Champions League Anthem to include a sentence in Spanish.”

The relevance of the French language use on an international level seems to be dwindling, however, it is unlikely that it will become entirely redundant. Years of international diplomatic use and staunch national protection of this language will certainly ensure that its use is perpetuated in global forums. This decreasing relevance does leave room for other languages to be used alongside French; while the UN is unlikely to take on another official language in the near future, football could be a very good starting point.

In the recent post ‘European agents are actually misusing English’ I discussed the role of the English within the European Institutions and the possibility that this could become the EU’s official language*. We received some interesting feedback on the article from Jeremy Gardner, the author of an EU report on the misuse of English in the European Institutions. Below he gives his opinion on the changing role of English and other European languages within the European Institutions:

“Joachim Gauck, the German President gave a speech on 22 February 2013, in which, among other things, he called for the acceptance of English as the European Union’s lingua franca. This has lead to a certain amount of more or less informed debate, including a recent article in the Guardian asking whether English should be the official language of the EU.
At the time of writing, the EU currently has 23 official languages and a large but probably indefinable number of other languages that, for one historical or political reason or another, are not classified as official, despite the fact that some have more speakers than many of the official languages. Catalan, for example, has no ‘official language’ status in the EU, despite having around nine million speakers, whereas Slovenian does have official status with only 2.5 million. Similarly the (non-official) Luxembourg national language has nearly twice as many speakers as (official) Irish. There is little or no likelihood of these being reduced to one ‘official’ language in the foreseeable or even distant future.
Within the European institutions themselves, the situation is actually not much simpler. Although French, German and English have traditionally enjoyed a higher procedural status, particularly at the Commission, which is the largest institution, the other languages are not excluded completely, so, at the European Parliament, for example, translation of working documents is provided for all official languages as required.
As for the three main languages, the balance between them has changed radically over the last twenty years. French, which used to be the dominant language in most contexts has retreated dramatically, except perhaps at the Court of Justice, where it has an official monopoly, English has taken over the spaces vacated by its traditional rival and German, quite frankly, is on life support.
The reasons for this are fairly simple. German never really had a fighting chance, despite having over 90 million speakers spread out over 11 of the 27 EU member countries. It is perceived as an almost impossibly difficult language and the German authorities have never made a concerted attempt to prop it up in this connection. French, on the other hand, has always enjoyed strong support from the French government and people, who, unlike the Germans, feel very strongly about this issue. It also benefits from the fact that all the main European institutions are located in largely or partly French speaking towns (Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg), meaning both that there have traditionally been a large number of locally recruited French speaking employees and that some knowledge of the language is important for the daily lives of EU staff and their families.
English, on the other hand, has a two-fold role in Europe. Aside from being one of the larger languages in terms of native speakers, it is also almost universally the second language of choice throughout the continent due to its status as a world language, meaning that newly recruited officials – including, these days, most French speakers – already come to Brussels or Luxembourg with a working knowledge of the language and only learn French and/or German afterwards, if at all.
All of this means that, if we decided to save money by reducing the number of languages employed in the EU’s everyday work, there would currently only one be language that could work – English – and this would be true even if the United Kingdom did decide to go its own way. Any of the other suggestions put forward (French, German, Esperanto, Latin etc) would flounder on demographics. Everything would grind to a halt because there are simply not enough people who speak – or could be made to speak – these languages sufficiently well to keep the machinery running (this is already a problem with English).
The question is: how much money would it actually save? Communications with member countries and the general public would still have to be conducted in a language that the other party understands, MEPs would still have to be able to speak in their own languages and legislation would still have to be translated. Although there may be scope for having this latter task being performed in the countries themselves, this is not as simple as it sounds: which version would be correct – the French one or the Belgian, the German or the Austrian?
In the end, what it may all boil down to is downgrading French to the status of the other languages, thus avoiding the translation of a certain amount of administrative documentation. One wonders if the comparatively insignificant savings that would be obtained by this somewhat churlish proposal would be worth the political damage that would ensue.”

*As you will read in Mr Gardner’s comment, this was inaccurate, as English is already one of the EU’s 23 official languages.

In February of this year the President of Germany, Joachim Gauck, made the rather controversial suggestion that English should be made the official language of the European Union. His remark was not made without motive, as it was part of his appeal to Great Britain to remain in the European Union. The statement was met with anger from many non-anglophone EU citizens, and certainly gave cause for concern to those countries that are already fighting the ever increasing impact of English on their national languages.

Those who are in favour of Gauck’s proposal have argued that English is already, for the most part, the principal language of the EU, where it is used as a popular common language for communication between natives of other European countries. However, native English speakers working at the institutions might be quick to argue that this is not the case; whilst the use of English is becoming more and more widespread in the European institutions, the language used is no longer English, but rather a kind of ‘Euro-English’.

A report written by Jeremy Gardner, a senior translator at the European court of Auditors has revealed the extent to which the English used in the institutions has been affected by its use among non-native speakers. The short piece entitled ‘A brief list of misused English terminology in EU publications’ lists a number of wrongly used English words, some of which are used in such a way that a sentence could have completely different meaning for a native English speaker than the intended message. Gardner compiled this list by taking information from ‘statements of preliminary findings’ and draft reports from the Court of Auditors. Other words were supplied by his English-speaking colleagues. The terms were then checked against dictionaries, native speakers in the UK, and the British National Corpus, which is a 100 million word collection of samples of written and spoken English from a wide range of sources, intended to represent a broad cross-section of current British English.

Some employees have argued that whilst English used in the European Institutions is not always correct, it is easily understood internally, as these unofficial definitions are used with such frequency. However, Gardner was keen to point out that European documentation is often intended for public use, this means that  English used within the EU should be neutral and intelligible for the average lay person, not only well versed ‘eurocrats’.

Below are a few examples of words which are frequently misused:

 Actual

Explanation: ‘Actual’ is sometimes used to refer to something that is happening now. However, in English it means ‘real’ or ‘existing’.

Example: ‘The Commission’s actual policy is to employ contract staff.’

Alternatives: current, present.

 Project

Explanation: We sometimes find ‘project (of)’ used with the meaning of ‘draft’. It is more common in working documents than in published reports, but some cases filter through into the Official Journal.

Example: ‘A number of technical and editorial amendments were also introduced to define the scope of some provisions, to make the wording of the Directive more explicit and more consistent with the wording of the project of Regulation on placing on the market88.’

Alternative: draft.

Sickness insurance

Explanation: As the correct term is health insurance, presumably one would take out ‘sickness insurance’ if one wanted to stay in bad health. I am afraid we are stuck with the paradoxical ‘joint sickness insurance scheme’, but the term should be avoided in other contexts.

Example: ‘A national authority may refuse authorisation to receive treatment in another

Member State only if treatment which is the same or equally effective for the patient can

Click the link to read the report in full.

The recent controversy surrounding the Venezuelan presidential elections has been well documented in the international press. Hugo Chavez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro, won the national election by a margin of just 1.6%, or approximately 275,000 votes. Maduro now has many obstacles to overcome as president- these include reducing the country’s soaring inflation rate (currently at more than 22%) and decreasing the country’s appalling levels of violent crime, all the while attempting to continue Chavez’s legacy. These challenges are made all the more difficult when taking into account the diversity of the Venezuelan population. Whilst Chavez championed the poor who live in the country’s slums, he alienated the middle class, leaving the newly elected president with the task of winning them over. The Venezuelan population is not only diverse as regards social class but also ethnicity- the country is home to around 500,000 indigenous people, and many non-indigenous Venezuelans have Italian, French or German heritage. This diversity is reflected in the variety of languages spoken in the country. Like the majority of Latin American countries, the constitutional language of Venezuela is Spanish, however, around 40 other languages are also spoken in the country. More than 30 of these are indigenous minority languages such as Wayuu, Warao and Pemón. Aside from the variety of different languages spoken, there are also a number of different regional Spanish dialects spoken in the country. The following are some of the major Venezuelan dialects:

The Caracas dialect

This dialect is spoken in the capital and is considered to be the standard Spanish of Venezuela, it is also spoken in other areas of the country such as Valencia.

The Zulian dialect

This is spoken in the north-west of the country and is also called maracucho or marabino, this dialect uses voseo.

The Lara dialect

This dialect also uses voseo, but combines this with Old Spanish verbal declensions -ades, -edes, -odes gave -ais, -eis, and -ois (“vos cantáis”, “vos coméis”, “vos sois”).

The Andean dialect

This is spoken in particular in the state of Táchira, near the Colombian border. It is characterized by a non-aspirated pronunciation of ‘s’ and use of Usted instead of tú, even within informal contexts.

The Margaritan dialect

This is spoken on Isla de Margarita and in the north-east of mainland Venezuela. The Margaritan dialect uses a strong ‘r’ instead of ‘l’ in most words.

Thanks to Venezuela’s cultural heritage and linguistic diversity some frequently used words show an interesting mixture of standard Spanish and ‘borrowed’ words from other languages. Here are a few examples:

Chévere = An exclamation of approval, E.g. ‘Cool!’ (derived from Yoruban (West Africa) ‘ché egberi’).

Musiú = Foreigner. A white native from non-hispanic countries (believed to come from the French ‘Monsieur’).

Balurdo(a) = adj. Meaning ‘flashy’ (from the French ‘balourd’).

Contorno = n. A side dish (From the Italian ‘contorno’).

Coroto(s) = n. Stuff, belongings (After 16th century French artist Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot).

Guachimán = n. A guard (From the English ‘watchman’).

Paisano = n. Abbreviated as Paisa, this word usually refers to a native of Colombia (From the Italian “Paesano”).

In a country with such linguistic and cultural diversity, Maduro certainly has a difficult task ahead of him, so all that is left is to wish him ¡buena suerte!

The European Parliament has announced that as many as 120 European languages are now officially endangered, with Finland being home to seven of these. This announcement comes following a meeting on 20 March between the European Parliament’s culture committee and experts on the subject. French MEP Francois Alfonsi voiced his concern over the decline of these languages saying that “Without concrete support at European, national and local level, we will see a further decline in linguistic diversity over the next decades. This will leave all of us culturally, socially and economically impoverished.” The importance of stepping in to preserve minority languages has also been recognised by UNESCO, which argues that that their disappearance “is neither inevitable nor irreversible”. Its Endangered Languages Programme aims to demonstrate its belief that “well-planned and implemented language policies can bolster the ongoing efforts of speaker communities to maintain or revitalise their mother tongues and pass them on to younger generations”.

This announcement is a reminder of just how important it is to protect and promote minority languages, and one small British publishing company is trying its best to do so. Diglot books produces bilingual children’s books in many languages, one of which is Cornwall’s endangered language of Kernowek, or Kernewek. Around 500 people cited Cornish as their main language in the 2011 census, which places the language as “endangered” on the Catalogue of Endangered Languages, a global collaborative project to preserve languages. Diglot was told by online retailer Amazon that its bilingual Cornish/English children’s book “Matthew and the Wellington Boots (Matthew ha’n Eskisyow Glaw in Cornish)” would not be made available for use on kindles because it was in a language that is not currently supported by the platform, but the publisher decided to fight back. Director Alison O’Dornan said that it appealed “on the basis that our title was actually bilingual and that the Cornish translation had been checked by an examiner for the Cornish Language Board, the alphabet was the same as English so there were no extra characters needed”. When their appeal failed she turned to social media for support, and eventually won. Matthew and the Wellington Boots is now for sale as an e-book via Amazon and Apple – where it has already received two five-star reviews, one in Cornish. O’Dornan underlined the important role of the younger generations in the preservation of minority languages, “The key to truly reviving the language is clearly with the younger generation and bilingual books are a fantastic way to achieve this as they are easily accessible to both parents and children alike”.

Consider some of the world’s most important literary works: Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Homer’s Odyssey, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Now consider some rather less high-brow contemporary novels: Harry Potter, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, even Fifty Shades of Grey. All of these works have achieved international acclaim on some level, none of which would have been possible without the aid of the humble translator. Sadly, due praise is not often given to the secondary authors behind these success stories- I for one would be pushed to name a famous literary translator. Of course there are those writers who have translated their own works, such as Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), but even in these cases it is not usually their translation skills that are celebrated. Surely the person who has painstakingly analysed the structure of every paragraph, the syntax of every sentence and the nuances of every word of a novel should be given some acknowledgment for making all of this information accessible to a new audience.

This thought struck me whilst reading Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s latest novel “The Prisoner of Heaven” (ES , El Prisionero del Cielo), in English; I have read other books in the Shadow of The Wind series and each time marvelled at the quality of the seamless English translation. Zafón’s writing is impressive- the interwoven plotlines and intriguing characters make for an addictive read, and the global success that he has experienced is testament to this. However, this international success could not have been reached without the work of the equally skilled translators who have produced the foreign language editions of these novels. Yet despite the high calibre of her English translation of Zafón’s novels, I had never heard of Lucia Graves.

Another internationally bestselling series is the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson, his novels have also been made accessible to a global audience through translation. In this case the English translator did become well known in some literary circles, but for all the wrong reasons. Many criticised the translation of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, which was completed by the American translator Steven T. Murray under the pseudonym “Reg Keeland”. Why would a translator need a pseudonym, I hear you ask? His carefully constructed American English translation was edited for the British English market, but he did not get the chance to review the final edit. He was so disappointed upon finally reading it that he was left with no choice but to request that his real name be withheld from the final translation, so as not to damage his reputation. He made his anger at this new edition clear, commenting that “This…is no longer the work of the author, who is sadly no longer with us to defend his work! They didn’t even keep his original title, which he used for a very good reason: Men [sic] Who Hate Women.”Even with the criticism that “Keeland” received, the fact that he has made Larsson’s novels available to a wider audience, and therefore contributed to the series’ success, is undeniable.  

Imagine the pressure of having to translate a nationally celebrated work for a global audience; get it right and the author could become a worldwide success story, get it wrong and the translator may well be in the firing line.

At UPS translations we always ensure that we choose the right linguist for the job. We use linguists who can cover a wide range of specialist subject areas and regional linguistic differences and who, above all, are experienced. So it was a shame that the BBC didn’t decide to use one of our linguists to interpret the newly elected Pope Francis’ first public speech; the interpretation which was broadcast on live TV for the BBC amused viewers, with many taking to Twitter to express their disbelief.

To see the amusing video for yourself, see the original article at:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2292936/BBC-slammed-Pope-election-coverage-translator-fails-translate-Hail-Mary-Our-Father-prayers-correctly.html#socialLinks