Thursday, November 30, 2006
"Do You Speak Hispanic?"
Want to denounce English First advocates as racists? Simply confuse (or fuse) the separate catagories of "Spanish-speakers" and "Spanish people," as this contributor to Daily Kos did:
Part of the right-wing agenda at the recent mid-terms was to exploit the race card by disguising it as a question of "immigration" or "language", with the clear target of both being the growing visibility of Hispanic [sic] speakers.
The other side is quick to speak of nuturing linguistic minorities but silent on the real costs of all this nurturing.
This 2004 BBC article on European Union translation costs should even give pause to the language rights lobby:
When 10 new countries join the European Union on 1 May, they bring with them an extra nine languages to add to the EU's existing 11. ...
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. ...
The European Commission already has 1,300 translators, who process 1.5 million pages a year in the EU's 11 languages.
In two years that is expected to rise to almost 2.5 million pages - and the staff, based in two enormous buildings in Brussels and Luxembourg, will almost double in size to cope with the output.
The cost will rise from roughly 550 million euros today to over 800 million euros after enlargement.
As of this writing (November, 2006), one euro is worth about $1.30. So the E.U. is spending over one billion dollars for translations.
What a waste.
|posted by Jim on 1:29 AM|
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