> Expansionist dream turns into nightmare for Europe's leaders
> By Stephen Castle in Brussels
> 07 May 2001
>
> The European Parliament operates with interpretation into each of the 11
> official EU tongues. Stacks of documents pile up. The system still just
> about works, but who can translate Portuguese into Latvian or Bulgarian
> into Finnish?
GAAAAHHHHH... Sorry... I'm a Comparative Literature scholar, so this kind of xenophobic idiocy really, really, really rubs me the wrong way. Memoranda to all jackass journalists: *every language is beautiful*. The art of translation is the art of life itself. Diversity in meaning and expression is the highest joy of culture; only a blinkered thought, which regards words as positivistic variables, to be slotted into the unthinking machines which are the primary ideology of late capitalism (whose flip side is the unthinking reduction of human beings to timeless national essences: "The French", "The Germans" etc.) could possibly complain about there being too many words. With modern information technology, you just make duplicate copies of things, and hire as many translators as you need to get the job done.
Maybe I'm being utopian, but I can't help but think that the birth of the European Union is a fantastic moment for humanity: it's the first giant step beyond the prisonhouse of the nation-state. If we're going to survive as a species, it will only be through such multinational institutions, which have the collective power to stand up to multinational capital -- and *win*.
-- Dennis