Blogging Translator

Reported shortage of decent English translators for the EU, really?

I read this interesting article on the Times Online this morning, taken from the Sunday Times. We all know August is the silly season for the media, and although this particular story isn’t ’silly’ in the traditional sense, it did strike me as a little bizarre (particularly in light of the daft reader comments that follow it). Apparently the standard of English native speaker linguists applying to the EU’s forthcoming recruitment campaign is so poor that the EU is having to recruit non-native speakers instead. I quote:

Brussels rules state that translators into English should have the language as their mother tongue. British standards are so poor, though, that the EU has taken emergency measures.

Potential recruits are being given remedial coaching to bring their abilities up to standard, while a Eurocrat has been dispatched to scour Britain full-time for anyone who can speak foreign languages well, and to encourage schoolchildren to study them.

The article appears to apportion some of the blame to the decreasing number of children studying languages at GCSE level. I wrote a post in June about a petition to the Prime Minister to save foreign language provision in UK secondary schools, but I would be surprised if the Government’s relatively recent (2004) decision to remove languages from the list of compulsory subjects at GCSE was having such a rapid effect.

I also think there must be more than meets the eye to this story; I can only surmise about the reasons for this seemingly dire situation, but perhaps the EU needs to target its recruitment campaigns at more highly qualified linguists in the UK. The prospect of working as a translator at the EU is a very much sought after ideal for modern language undergraduates who as yet may have little other knowledge about translation as a profession. I must say that whilst I was an undergraduate I had to do a great deal of individual research into what being a professional translator was really like. Many a day was spent in the Cardiff University careers centre reading up on translation as a career, but it wasn’t until I was halfway through my MA in Translation at Westminster University that I began to fully understand what my chosen career would involve, and that it wouldn’t necessarily have to involve moving to Brussels. The public perception of translation as a career is still largely that of a career in the EU after a short spell studying for a BA in languages, but this is a very narrow impression of the profession indeed.

Consequently, perhaps a large number of the applications are from enthusiastic but fundamentally untrained graduates who hanker after the ‘glamour’ of working at the EU, perhaps not fully appreciating the level of skill and precision required by the entrance tests. Moreover, I have never noticed a requirement in the EU recruitment campaign for any form of specific training in the field of translation (for example postgraduate studies such as the Chartered Institute of Linguists Diploma in Translation), and it is widely accepted these days that, unless they already have industry experience, most new entrants to the profession will need to undertake this type of training in order to reach an adequate standard.

The EU recruitment campaigns are also usually quite low-key in this country. If they want to target a different class of translator then perhaps they need to create more of a fanfare about their recruitment campaign, whilst also focussing on the professional associations such as the ITI and the universities that train translators to a professional level.