EU: Bringing Down the Language Barrier - Automatically

[Harold Schiffman]

Bringing Down the Language Barrier - Automatically

Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 2nd May 2008 20:52 UTC, submitted by irbis
 One of the biggest problems facing the European Union today is the
fact that within its borders, 23 languages are spoken. This means that
all the important documents have to be translated by a whole army of
translators, which costs the taxpayer more than 1 billion Euros a year
- and companies trading within the EU spend millions more. The
EU-funded TC-STAR project aims to tackle this issue with technology: a
system that eats speech in one language, and outputs that same speech
in another.

[comment:] The main issue with regard to the language policy in the EU
is not the cost of the translation and of the interpretation.
Translation and interpretation is needed to respect the language
rights of the members of the european parliament. And all the laws
must be translated to all the official languages. The main issue is
the discrimination for non English native speakers. The professor of
economy François Grin wrote an article about the amount of money which
is transfered to UK because English is more and more used as an
international language in all the fields of the society (shools,
universities, work, NGO, associations...). The transfer is at least 17
billions Euros a year. Esperanto would be a much better compromise and
the EU could spare 25 billions Euros according to Grin.

English takes a lot of time to learn. It replaces other languages.
Esperanto is much easier and leave place for the other languages.


http://www.osnews.com/thread?312625
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