Broken English

Last week I had a long train journey across the north of Spain from the Mediterranean (Tarragona) to the Atlantic (Irun).  It took five and half hours, so I took along some good reading: a report that I picked up at the Mediterranean Editors and Translators’ Conference that I had attended the previous week. Witten by Jeremy Gardner for the European Court of Auditors this report explores European institutions quirky and sometimes misleading use of English.   

The opening sentence sums it up very neatly "Over the years the European institutions have developed a vocabulary that differs from that of any recognised form of English".  He goes onto to identify four main forms of EU-English:

·         words that don't exist in English, such as 'planification' and 'comitology';

·         words that are used in English but in completely different contexts  such as 'homogenise', 'mission' or 'agent';

·         new technological terms that don’t exist in English, and

·         misused prepositions and confusion of countable and uncountable nouns. 

I realise how ‘native’ I have gone since I use, or at least accept, many of the examples he uses in bullet points two and three without blinking an eye.

While it makes for amusing reading, the use of ambiguous jargon makes it harder for citizens to understand what is being done in their name, or what they are being asked to do.  This the more so as all ‘important’ official EU documents (don’t ask me how important is defined) are subsequently translated into twenty seven other languages with the potential for multiplying misunderstanding.  One reviewer comments "This list is weirdly fascinating. It explains a lot about why EU documents read like some kind of Kafkaesque nightmare, where you're being commanded to do things that don't quite make any sense."

Yet this confusion and muddying of the waters may smooth the path of EU diplomacy.  Herman van Rompuy, the EU president once sang the virtues of ‘asymmetric translation’: “the ambiguity and mugginess helps them (EU politicians) to make the kind of political compromises here that need to be made in a project like this – they allow leaders to agree to things that otherwise, if they were explained in plain English, would be political death for them at home”.  A prime example of comitology I think.   Well worth a read if you are a wordsmith who deals with EU institutions.  

  

You can download the report here or take a Eurospeak test here 

The Hendaye Diaries: Life in the fast lane part 2

It’s been quite a week – I’ve had a friend from Entre-Deux-Mers stay all week.  We talked about permaculture, biodynamics, Hemmingway and loads of other things.  I learned loads of new cookery and gardening tips. She’s a good influence on my life.   She subtly ensures that I go for a long walk on the beach every day, keeps me away (or more distant) from the bottle and through watching/listening to her I am learning a great deal about the ‘touchstones’ for communicating effectively with the locals.  

I’ve lost track of the enormously beautiful experiences I have had this week. 

• Eating fresh clementines from tree in ‘my’ garden.
• Standing on the edge of the jetty that is the most south-westerly point in mainland France and watching the surfer boys and girls do their acrobatics from an oceanic view point,
• Singing Basque songs (mostly -I was told about ‘love gone bad’ - in an old coach house, 25 metres from the border crossing.
• Visiting a cidirie close to San Sebastian, where they tap the cider straight out of 8000 litre barrels (and do a mean steak, big enough for four to people to share)
• Picnicking on the cliffs of St Jean de Luz and seeing the waves resemble dolphins - while aware of snow-capped mountains behind our backs. 
• And much more.

But it’s also been a productive week. I think I have found the flat that I want to be  chez moi for the coming years, and have made considerable progress towards getting  a business structure established and opening a French bank account. As anyone who has been, or is, an ex-pat these are incredibly time consuming and frustrating exercises.  And I have work coming out of my ears,  editing projects on the fuure of agriculture in the EU, seed dissemination in Africa, coffee supply chains in Ethiopia and berry supply chains in Latvia and Serbia.  The wheels kind of fell off of my truck six weeks or so ago – when a flat I  wanted fell through and the complexities of registering a business here seemed insurmountable .  I have only just managed to put them back on :-)   The only down side to all this is that I haven’t touched my book in the past week L

Beginnings of a new year

I reclaimed my office this weekend.  After my roomy left in November I decided to leave it empty for two months uncertain whether to find another roomy or reclaim ‘the spare bedroom’ as my office space.   The benefits of having a roomy were manifold: company in the evening without having to go out - someone to look after the flat and my mail on (those frequent occasions last year) when I was away and, not least,  someone paying half the rent.  But it did involve certain sacrifices – having to negotiate freezer space (he bought lots of frozen veg – I like to cook double and freeze these for a ‘rainy day’ (plenty of those in Brussels) and squeezing my office into a corner of (first my bedroom, then later our lounge).  It never really felt like I had enough space.  My desk was too small and the wrong height, I experienced ‘paper creep’ – letters and work projects taking over the sofa, the carpet and eventually the kitchen table.  And sometimes important papers got put away somewhere obscure and answered too late. But I decided to sit it out two months and see what came out in the settling process.  

 Eventually this weekend I took the plunge and spent much of Sunday de- and re-wiring my office –a process made more complicated by it being cramped into one corner with the wires and connections hidden behind and underneath furniture.  There were the inevitable problems with wires not being long enough to put the various bits of kit where they would be ergonomically and aesthetically most pleasing- I was sure I had a long cable to attach the printer to the pc but after a long search through my suitcase full of cables it couldn’t be found so I had to come up with an inventive office redesign that - to my surprise - actually works.   The most attractive feature though is that the office really catches the morning light and you can see the skyscrapers of the Brussels’ World Trade Centre glimmering in the light. On a sunny day the room is positively luminous – a real incentive to start the day on a positive note rather than procrastinate about starting to work.  It finally likes the start of the New Year is finally upon me.  Roll on sunny days and longer evenings!