It has been described as a modern Tower of Babel. The European Parliament will echo with up to 20 different languages when the EU expands next year, and each will be instantly translated into the others.
The result is a possible 380 combinations of languages -- as elected representatives from Finland to Malta make laws that will affect the lives of some 450 million EU citizens.
"There are no other international organizations that even dream about operating like this," said Patrick Twidle, the man in charge of preparing parliament's interpreting service for EU enlargement next May.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
What he called the "big bang" expansion of the EU will almost double the number of languages used in the assembly, requiring a major rethink of how the interpreting service operates.
Assuming all 10 accession countries, mostly in eastern Europe, take up the invitation to join the 15 existing EU states, each will bring its own language.
The only exception is the divided island state of Cyprus, which, unless its Greek and Turkish sides unify, will use only Greek, already an EU tongue.
Even the Mediterranean island state of Malta, a former British colony where most of the 400,000 inhabitants speak fluent English, will have its own language recognized. Romania and Bulgaria hope to enter the EU in 2007.
The reason parliament has resisted going the UN path of selecting a handful of widely- used working languages is the principle that anyone, not just the highly educated or linguistically gifted, has the right to sit in the assembly.
From four to 20
"The only qualification you have to have to get here is to be elected," said Twidle. "Parliament will always be the last bastion of this multilingual exercise."
That exercise was fairly simple when the EU was in its infancy in the 1950s.
The EU's forerunners, the Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community, had only six member states and four languages, meaning no more than 12 language combinations.
The EEC's first enlargement to three new countries in 1973 added Danish and English to the list.
Ireland, which joined with Britain and Denmark, accepted English as its working language. Irish, like Luxembourgian, was made an official language for written EU law but is not spoken in parliament.
Since the last enlargement in 1995 the EU has had 11 working languages. On any given day, parliament needs between 300 and 500 interpreters, who are usually required to be able to work from at least three foreign languages into their mother tongue.
Finding Finnish and Swedish staff proved difficult back in 1995, Twidle said, as, for political reasons, parliament was not allowed to start recruiting until the countries had held referendums on joining -- leaving them only two months.
But the introduction of tricky Finnish -- a non-Indo-European language related to Hungarian and Estonian but to none in the current EU -- changed the way Twidle's department worked.
For the first time, interpreters had to work in both directions -- Finnish staff had to translate out of and into their language, a system called "retour" in the jargon.
"With the big bang that we are facing now, we have got to do it like that," Twidle said.
The new system will use both retour and "relay" -- a system where one language is translated into another via a "bridge" language like English, French or German.
This already happens in some situations, but will be the case for all the new languages which will be "bolted on" to the existing network of interpreters.
Chinese whispers
Some fear the increase of retour and relay could lead to more instances of "Chinese whispers" where the speaker's meaning is twisted by the time it is translated.
The European Parliament has been preparing for the last seven years for next year's enlargement, working with universities in eastern Europe to help increase language training and offering working visits to Brussels and Strasbourg.
"It is only in the past few years that Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian have attained official status in international relations where previously only Russian was used," Twidle said.
"Finding interpreters with the appropriate language skills has not been easy. Nevertheless, in 2004, Latvian and Maltese will have the right to be treated on the same footing as French, German or English.
"We need people that are university educated, have a good general knowledge and the highest language standards. That kind of person can get a job anywhere."
Parliament is aiming to be ready from July to host its first plenary session after the June European elections.
That will involve constructing scores of new interpreters' booths and wiring up the complex system -- developed in-house -- to allow linguists and listeners to switch between languages.
The system has already been shown to work.
In November last year the assembly hosted a welcome session for the 187 "observers" who act as shadow members of parliament for the candidate countries ahead of enlargement and the elections in June next year.
During that session 23 languages, including Bulgarian, Romanian and Turkish were covered.
"Nobody remarked upon the proliferation of languages in the chamber," Twidle said. "In the European Parliament, unlike the Tower of Babel, members can get by with just one language -- their own."
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