Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

So reads a recent version of the basic language rule of the European Union. It was originally laid down in Article 248 of the Treaty of Rome, which first set up the European Economic Community in 1957: that body, and any offices under its authority, was to communicate with the governments of each of the member states in the language of the member state in question. It sounds a modest requirement, but it was actually a revolution. Unlike all previous empires, communities, treaties, and international organizations, the European Union has no one language and no finite set of languages, either. It speaks in all the languages that it needs, whatever they may be. An act of political will made the previously ungrammatical expression “a single original in Danish, Dutch, English …” an authoritative rule.

To begin with, there were six states—Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, and Italy—and four languages involved: French, Dutch, German, and Italian. The EU has grown meanwhile and now has twenty-seven states using twenty-four different languages. But whether we are dealing with four or twenty-four languages, the revolutionary meaning of the basic rule, ill understood when adopted and not widely acknowledged even now, is that in the whole huge mass of paper put out by the EU, there are no translations. Everything is the original, already.

Each language version of a law, regulation, directive, or letter emanating from the commission or any of its institutions has the same force, the same authority, the same validity as any other. Nothing is a translation—except that everything is translated. This has been the unprecedented language rule under which increasingly large numbers of people have now lived and worked for more than fifty years.

You might think it would have made a difference to what people say about translation, but for the most part it has not. Since it is theoretically impossible to have more than one original of a text in the long-standing traditions of literary study and language teaching, people have tended to disregard the language reality of the EU, to denigrate it as a waste of a huge amount of money, or have uttered dire warnings of the risks it incurs. However, I’ve yet to meet a translator who has turned down a well-paid job in Brussels or Strasbourg on language-theoretical grounds.

The language rule of the Treaty of Rome was obviously not thought up by philosophers, linguists, or translators, let alone by theorists. It arose from the need to make all members of this daring new venture feel they had equal respect and equal rights—to abolish what I have dubbed translation UP and DOWN. It was invented by politicians for eminently political reasons. What’s more, those politicians and several generations of their successors have been prepared to devote substantial sums of money to making the language-parity rule work. DG Translation (the translation division of the European civil service) currently employs 1,750 linguists and 600 support staff, and spends vast amounts of money to produce millions of pages of administrative and legal prose every year—probably more than has ever been spent on translation by any community ever before.[140]

From the 1960s it became fashionable to think, in a manner attributed to Michel Foucault, that language is power and that all power is language. The EU language story, like George Orwell’s polemical invention of “Newspeak” in Nineteen Eighty-Four, doesn’t invalidate that entirely—but it does go to show that, in the last analysis, power is power. Language is no less a possible object of political will than any other human activity.

The language-parity rule has many interesting consequences. It means that no official EU text can be faulted or dismissed or even queried on grounds of it having been incorrectly translated from the original, since every language version is in the original. Faced with a single original in twenty-four different languages, none of the inherited and traditional issues of translation commentary has much purchase. You could call this a political fiction. But it is not theoretical. It exists.

Paired texts in different languages each having equal force are nothing new, in fact. The Rosetta stone bears a decree written in 196 B.C.E. in honorific legalese to record a tax amnesty granted to temple priests in Egypt. It was carved on a slab of basalt in koiné Greek, in demotic Egyptian, and in hieroglyphics.

The decree was clearly intended to have the same force for three different groups of people among its potential addressees. Commonly treasured as the source of the clues that led to the decipherment of hieroglyphic script, the Rosetta stone should also be taken as proof that the founders of the EU were not seeking the impossible when they adopted the language-parity rule.