Comments on: What’s the Irish for boondoggle?

By: Keith Gaughan

Keith Gaughan — Mon, 28 Jun 2004 15:00:32 +0000

Sorry I couldn’t post sooner: I wasn’t near a computer over the weekend. You’re right on the directives. The directives themselves don’t need to be As Gaeilge, but the inacting bill does. The directives don’t need to be in any particular language. They could written in martian for all it matters, and this applys to any european country. What I meant was that they need to be translated if requested, and that making Irish an official language wouldn’t cause any increase as, for reasons of law in this country, the government has to be prepared to release translations of the directives as it stands. I’m sorry if I was misunderstood on this. To Randy: Irish is the country’s first language, and whatever some may say, it is still a living language. But it’s a minority language too.

By: Antoni Jaume

Antoni Jaume — Sun, 27 Jun 2004 22:14:50 +0000

hp, the predominance of English in the USA is not due to simple social convenience, while you are right that the USA has no federal official language, quite a few states have adopted at one time or another an “US English only” policy. As for the Irish, it will be official in Ireland as long the Irish people want, the question here is if that means that an Irish individual can communicate with EU institutions in Irish, without having to resort to another language. In this moment the answer is yes. DSW

By: John Ross

John Ross — Sat, 26 Jun 2004 15:36:34 +0000

…and that the point of preserving linguistic diversity is a bit like conservation of a species. You may not have a very good reason why it should be kept, but you never know what you might lose, either.

By: John Ross

John Ross — Sat, 26 Jun 2004 15:31:41 +0000

I have hugely enjoyed this thread, though I have no real stance on the issue. I would point out, though, that all the Spanish regional languages mentioned – Basque, Catalan, Galician – are, like Maltese, living languages.

By: des von bladet

des von bladet — Sat, 26 Jun 2004 11:39:02 +0000

hp, he or she say: So my advice to Europe would be to forgo official languages altogether. The only concievable purpose for having official languages is to exclude non-official ones, like Irish. Official languages, in the context of the EU, are those in which official documents are published, and which may be used in (the EU’s own) Parliament where interpreters are provided to translate into all other official languages.

By: HP

HP — Sat, 26 Jun 2004 02:07:06 +0000

For what it’s worth, the United States has no official language. Granted, most people speak at least some English, and most (if not all) official documents are written in English, but a citizen has the right to request translations. It’s not uncommon in some parts of the country to find ballots or other documents in a variety of languages. English evolved as the de facto language over time (for example, I live in Cincinnati, Ohio, which like many midwestern cities once had a German-speaking majority), and every attempt over the last 200 years to make English official has failed (mostly because the “official English” crowd barely conceal their racism beneath a thin veneer of respectability). The US has one of the largest Spanish speaking populations in the world, as well as significant communities of Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese and other Asian languages. (Not to mention Navajo, Cherokee and other native languages, as well as native creoles like Cajun or Gullah.) So my advice to Europe would be to forgo official languages altogether. The only concievable purpose for having official languages is to exclude non-official ones, like Irish.

By: q

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 14:47:02 +0000

There has to be a very interesting project here: feeding all the multi-language copies into a single computer (lets call it “Chomsky 2”) to analyse all the language coming out of the EU. Of course, we could reduce the cost of translation and processing, if we reduced the number and length of douments coming out of the EU!

By: PM

PM — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 11:28:58 +0000

I imagine, the middle classes being what they are, that as long as its is a cumpulsory subject, and you get extra points for sitting the leaving cert in Irish, the language, the schools and the Gaeltacht (at least to send your kids to visit) will survive.

By: maria

maria — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 11:20:46 +0000

Thanks everyone for the comments and clarifications – especially Eimear for her point about translating directives. It seems that directives are not automatically translated into Irish (giving lie to claims that they’re all translated anyway so there’s no extra expense). But this also raises a slightly tricky issue of directives having direct legal effect in national courts (when they haven’t yet been transposed) but being only available in English. Also, in fairness, Liz O’Donnell in her statement on the issue a few months ago seemed to have a firmer hold on the idea of official versus working languages than Conradh seems to still. This just seems to be one of those issues where the rhetoric and emotion behind the proposed policy are very far removed from any pragmatic sense of what the benefits are and how it plays outside Ireland. (or maybe I’ve just been abroad for too long.) One last point from me. Randy McDonald; Irish may not be spoken fluently by everyone in the country, but it is very, very far from being a dead language!

By: JamesW

JamesW — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 10:28:35 +0000

The day to day, practical working languages of the EU (say for a staff meeting) are already few: really just English and French, and French is losing out. There’s a distinction to be drawn between publishing legislation in the Official Journal, since it’s used in national courts and has iconic value, and in EU business (Commission proposals and Parliament debates), where the language set required for universal comprehension is smaller. Noise is added by even very good translation and interpretation – just as it is by making people follow speech in a foreign language. Indirect translation adds more noise than direct, and Brussels is running out of people who can translate or interpret from say Estonian to Maltese: so they cheat and use indirect, which cements the status of the core languages. The objective should be to minimise the overall amount of linguistic noise, weighted for importance. When a directive is translated into Maltese, how do you resolve ambiguities with other versions? A Maltese court would surely give preference to the English or Italian text, since these would have been used for the drafting, rather than the later translation.

By: john s

john s — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 10:12:23 +0000

Many official EU documents are translated into all the official languages. But it is not uncommon for only the English or French versions to be read, even if the reader is a native Italian, Irish, Finnish etc speaker because the translations are weak.

By: Henry

Henry — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 09:03:50 +0000

Let’s take a moment to remember the great Myles na gCopaleen [aka Flann O’Brien, born Brian O Nolan], who got his start writing a column for the Irish Times over 60 years ago when he wrote in to complain about someone else’s column bemoaning the lack of an Irish word for buzz bomb, blitz and the like. On the other hand, I’m sure he could have come up with more than one Irish word for balderdash.

By: Caitriona O'Kelly

Caitriona O'Kelly — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 08:40:37 +0000

Just to clarify: Irish IS an official treaty language with 16 translators employed in the Court of Justice in Luxembourg. Therefore its status as the constitutional language of Ireland is recognised. It IS NOT a working language and does not need to be. Conradh na Gaeilge seem very confused on this distinction.

By: Greg

Greg — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 02:34:16 +0000

That is certainly true to a degree, William, but just as important is the fact that countless Irish teenagers hate the language all the way through school and wind up not understanding a word; only in adulthood do they realise what they’ve missed out on… Plenty of parents send their kids to Irish schools so they grow up using and liking their own language.

By: William Sjostrom

William Sjostrom — Fri, 25 Jun 2004 02:04:42 +0000

I think you are overrating the importance of the all Irish schools. Their attraction to parents includes the fact that classes are about half the size of other schools, that is to say, the government heavily subsidizes them. I know several parents who send their kids to those schools, having zero interest in the Irish language, precisely because of the extra resources available.