LOST IN TRANSLATION

People often underestimate the challenge faced by the European Union in coping with a veritable Tower of Babel of languages.

All legislation not only has to be agreed at Council and Parliament meetings, serviced by a battery of interpreters, but the resulting legislation has to be translated into the Union's many languages and the results have to be very carefully screened as each language version has equal validity in law. So it must be ensured that they are saying the same thing.

Not as easy as you might think, as anyone who has dealings with multiple languages will tell you.

I would like to cite an example from the 1990s when the European Community (as it then was) was introducing a directive regulating investment services. The degree of existing regulation was patchy across the Community and Ireland was effectively the Wild West in this regard.

In Ireland, the Stock Exchange was regulated from London and investment brokers, including some tiny outfits, were regulated only with respect to their insurance business. The rest was a matter of trust between broker and client against the background of the general legal system.

A small divarsion here. This is an interesting time to be looking back at this subject as it was Dessie O'Malley (recently deceased) who had brought yellow pack insurance regulation into that corner of the Wild West, with no small push from the European Community.

Then they got round to the investment brokers, both small and big. It was interesting at the time that in the course of the negotiations the continentals were attempting to get one up on the British and steal as much of London's financial business as possible for Paris and Frankfurt. They had the advantage that it was only the UK and Ireland within the Community which was governed by common law rather than the Napoleonic version on the continent.

They didn't succeed then, but it looks like they will now after the stupid British opting for Brexit.

Anyway back to my story.

After legislation has been agreed at Council level (the European Parliament was less relevant then) it has to be vetted by a group known as the Jurist/Linguists to ensure the cross language conformity I mentioned above. At this stage there should be no policy disagreements remaining and the question is only of language equivalence and equivalence of legal effect.

Unusually, I was called back to a meeting of Member State delegations following the discovery by the above group that we had agreed to two entirely diffent things, in the Investment Services Directive, depending on which language version you looked at.

The problem lay in the word "deficiency". The English language version, on which at least we and the Brits had negotiated, said that when there was a deficiency discovered in an investment firm certain action had to be taken. The French version, on which others had negotiated, used the word "pertes" which only implied a financial deficiency, whereas the English version, in the view of the British at least, implied also a deficiency in management or the general running of the business.

It was quite amazing to me that the long, and sometimes bitter, negotiations on the directive all the while concealed this linguistic deficiency, right through the process up to the final post-agreement juridical and linguistic screening.

Sadly, I don't remember how it was resolved but I think it is an interesting and a cautionary tale.

You can see from the dictionary definition below how this could have arisen. But that it was not picked up along the way was absolutely amazing.

Click on image for a readable version