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By Emma Wagner - May 2001
One of the key issues when working with the European Commission and in Europe in general is getting to grips with Eurospeak. Eurospeak can be confusing, complicated and sometimes elitist. It could also be avoided.
Emma Wagner discusses what she calls 'the disease of Eurospeak' and details guidelines for improvement, which the European Commission's Translation Service are trying to get across to authors inside the EC.
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Eurospeak comes in all languages, believe it or not, and in all cases the symptoms and causes are the same. In this article I'll talk about the English variant, Euro-English.
Linguists love to be tolerant about the way languages grow. Just as we accept all sorts of regional accents, the argument goes, we must accept and even celebrate all variants in written language… Very politically correct, but it overlooks one simple fact: that when speaking, you can see immediately if your listener doesn’t understand, and re-phrase your statement or adjust your accent immediately; when writing, you don’t get that instant feedback. So it is perfectly possible to churn out reams of incomprehensible writing that no-one will understand – or read!
Anyone trying to communicate in writing, and who wants their message to end up in their readers' brains rather than their bins, is well advised to follow a few rules and stay anchored in the reality of a real language.
One linguist of the tolerant school, David Crystal, writes in English as a Global Language: "There is even a suggestion that some of the territories [...] in which English is learned as a foreign language may be bending English to suit their purposes. 'Euro-English' is a label sometimes given these days to the kind of English being used by French, Greek and other diplomats in the corridors of power in the new European Union, for most of who English is a foreign language" [1].
I work in those corridors of power – or in one of the offices at the European Commission, to be precise – and the prospect of Euro-English acquiring special status because it is spoken by a powerful elite fills me with dread. Surely that would spell the end of the European Union, because it would cut us off from the public, who have a right to read Commission documents in real English? In a bid to prevent the spread of Eurospeak, Euro-waffle and plain bad English in Commission documents some fellow-translators and I started the Fight the FOG [2] campaign in 1998. We wanted to encourage Commission writers and translators to write clearly, in real English (and real French, real German, real Finnish, etc.). We also instructed them to KISS - Keep It Short and Simple.
I spend much of my working time trying to eradicate Eurojargon and bad English from texts written in the European Commission. Here’s a sample: a paragraph from the minutes of an important committee meeting, 35 (!!) pages long. This came into my department last week, for translation into the 10 other official languages of the EU.
"Mr A welcomed the participants to the ZZZ meeting, in particular to the Malta delegation, that attended the meeting for the first time. He passed the floor to Mrs B who was going to intervene on behalf the French Presidency of the European Union. […]
Mr A informed about the present stage of the works on the Directive on scaffolding and works in height. He said that in October the Council had agreed a common position. In the other hand, the Parliament had presented comments to the project of Directive. A meeting between the Parliament's reporters and the Presidency of the Council had taken place for establishing a more official position in the agreement. There had been a second meeting between the Commission and the political groups of the Parliament for discussing the contents of some of the amendments. He said that the differences between the Parliament and the Council were small and that the Parliament wished scaffolds below the normal height to be included."
Why does this sort of Euro-English get written? Here are some of the causes of the disease:
Drafting by non-native speakers is unavoidable, for organisational reasons, and some of them do an excellent job. But it inevitably causes problems of interference in vocabulary and syntax. Non-native speakers can't be expected to know what sounds natural in English. Even native speakers lose this sensitivity when working outside their mother-tongue environment. When you've heard words like "eventual" and "payment delays" misused hundreds of times, you can lose touch with their real meaning.
English has taken over from French as the main language used for communication inside the EU institutions. Of course, concessions have to be made for spoken communication in an organisation where fifteen different nationalities work together. But as the above example shows, the standard of "English" is often simply too low for written communication. It is certainly more defective than the French written here by non-natives. Why? Because Brussels is a partly French-speaking city? Because the French have stricter grammar and an Académie to outlaw barbaric imports, whereas English is a very flexible language that belongs to everyone and seems to know no rules? Or maybe (unfashionable view coming up here - sorry, Professor Crystal) because English grammar has not been taught in British schools for the past 40 years, so most native English speakers can't even explain to their non-native colleagues why paragraphs like the one quoted above are not real English? Only those of us who learnt foreign languages were lucky enough to acquire any grammar.
Many authors in the EU institutions come from a tradition or a culture where concision is not a virtue. Recently the French arm of a highly respected firm of management consultants did a study for us on one aspect of the Translation Service's operation. Their report ran to 186 pages and paralysed our e-mail system. When I asked them to produce a summary, they did - 50 pages!
Specialised language, or jargon as it is less politely called, aids communication between specialists. But if it spills over into the wrong context, it is irritating and sounds ridiculous. Acronyms such as CFSP, SANCO, SLIC and PECO are all pregnant with meaning for those who understand them, but alienating for those who don't [3]. We encourage authors to spell them out when first used, or to avoid them completely. Another nasty habit of Eurocrats is to use the names of towns to mean something quite different. "Schengen" is no longer a sleepy village in Luxembourg, but an agreement on a passport-free zone; "Amsterdam" is a Treaty, and "Gymnich" is an informal meeting of foreign ministers.
In the desire to secure agreement at any cost, documents are sometimes inflated - and their logic distorted - by the inclusion of disparate material. The motives are excellent, but the result is a kind of patchwork, which is not. Foggy language helps to achieve an appearance of political consensus. But it invariably creates problems for the future, when foggy Treaties and laws have to be put into effect.
The European Commission has recently started work on several solutions:
Maybe in addition there should be a major cutback in the number and length of publications, perhaps based on reader surveys to see which ones are really useful and which could be dispensed with. In addition we could use the power of the Internet to improve the quality of written communication from the Commission. For example, texts on the Europa server could incorporate:
There is a simple cure for this disease called Eurospeak. Let people speak it, by all means, in the interests of cooperation and in-house communication with each other. But encourage them not to write it, if they want outsiders to get the message.
The Fight the FOG campaigners are trying to highlight these key principles of good writing:
Audience awareness. Remember that the defective language we use when tired and rushed is not good enough for the outside world. We must try to prevent jargon spilling over into general writing.
Honesty. Resist the tendency to be pompous, as if status and dignity could be increased by using long words and convoluted syntax.
Responsibility. Beware of "patchwork drafting". Someone must retain overall responsibility for the structure and logic of a document. This is also called accountability.
Planning ahead. Allow enough time for drafting and translation.
Expert editing. Allow experts to rewrite documents before they are translated into 10 and soon 22 languages. Experts can be outside consultants or editors - or translators can do the rewriting. Don't say "they don't know enough about our field to understand our documents". If intelligent, interested readers don't understand, that proves that the documents need to be rewritten.
KISS: Keep It Short and Simple.
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Emma Wagner
Head of Department
Translation Service
European Commission
Emma Wagner studied Modern Languages at Cambridge received her MA in Translation and Interpreting from Bath University. She has worked for the European Commission since 1972 as a translator and translation manager. She is currently head of a translation department with 250 staff translating into and out of the 11 official languages of the European Union. In 1998 she started the Fight the Fog campaign at the European Commission because "foggy language is alienating for the general public and difficult to translate well".
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For citation purposes:
Wagner, E. "Eurospeak – Fighting the Disease", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/eurospeak/>
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