European Candidates’ debate round 2 : back to old habits - commentaires

European Candidates' debate round 2 : back to old habits

This was broadcast here in the UK by the BBC, on it's Parliamentary Channel (which is dedicated to political affairs and is broadcast free to air on terrestrial and satellite platforms, so almost everyone can see it if they wish).

However, for some of the time the translation service left much to be desired. Often it was almost impossible to hear the translation as the speaker was not muted ; this seemed particularly prevalent when Mr Tsipras was in full flow, the result being I often could not understand what he was actually saying. This also happened to Mr Juncker and my French is altogether too rusty to not rely on a translator.

As your article points out, English is so prevalent across the European Union and so broadly spoken it would not be unreasonable to conduct the whole affair in English. Certainly, the majority of the Twitter input appeared to be in that language.

European Candidates' debate round 2 : back to old habits

continued : For the sake of equal rights and opportunities, without regard of the person's origin and mother tungue, I'd say we have to accept the fact that we'll have to deal with translations in such debates. Of course, a lot gets lost in translation, that is indeed a problem. I would have preferred hearing at least the English speaking candidates (my French and Greek are too bad I'm afraid) in English and not the translation in my mother tungue, but for the sake of my grandparents having a chance to follow what is said, I prefer having the translations. Maybe this opens up new opportunities for translators. Maybe in future times, you could become a star in the EU by performing good in such translations. Debates could be announced like : « Martin Schulz, speaking German, translated by Johnny English and Jean-Jacques Junckers, speaking Letzebürgsch, translated by Bobby British, debating whather or not French should be used as the European lingua franca... » Competence in languages could be one outstanding point for the EU, which neither the US, nor China nor Russia could equally well get done (as they have their languages rather fixed).

Of course, at the moment, translations tend to be boring, rhetorics hardly get through, but we are only staring having those transeuropean debates. Hopefully, the future holds more of this. And so, things will improve.

European Candidates' debate round 2 : back to old habits

I am not sure what you refer to with « the first debate ». I am not aware of a debate prior to this one. Maybe only in a certain member state ? But what I wanted to comment is your sentence :

the standard European citizen can reasonably be expected to speak and understand a bit of English, but not English, French and Greek.

This, especially the first part of it, is absolute crap. I am happy to speak English besides my mother tungue. But if I look at the other people in my family, friends and other people I know, this becomes doubtful. The generation of my grandparents (80+ years) hardly speaks English, except those few who come from richer families and had a better education. But still, back then people rather learned Latin and Ancient Greek in school than modern languages... My parent's generation (around 60) learned English in school, but not all teachers were good and not all pupils could get a grasp of the language, at least not enough to follow such a debate. My father's English is not bad, he could well talk with you in person about various issues, but he would run into severe problems following a TV debate, because he is not used to different accents. My generation (30-40) is better in English, I don't think most people from my old class in school would have been able to follow the debate. Though I am not sure, I had to use English over the years, others might have forgotten big parts of it. And then there are also the exceptions. My younger sister never got a good control of English, she had bad teachers and wasn't too interested in languages altogether. She's a nurse, what would she ever need foreign languages for ? Now remember that this is the situation in a western member state of the EU, with the national language not being too different from English, the situation could well be even worse in the Eastern member states, where people oftentimes had Russian language class instead of English... So now, I must disagree completely, that the « standard » (who would that be anyway ?) European citizen knows English. Maybe a bit, words like « yes », « no », « love », « queen » or « Beatles ». But that is hardly enough to follow a debate.