Bureaucrats warned to keep it short as papers bog down EU translators

BRUSSELS, Belgium – The European Union told bureaucrats Wednesday to be less verbose, warning that long documents risked creating a translation backlog following the entry this month of 10 new countries.

“We need to control this,” said Eric Mamer, spokesman for the European Commission. “We want to encourage absolutely everybody to produce shorter documents.”

Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Maltese, Lithuanian, Estonian, Latvian and Slovene joined the existing 11 official EU languages when the bloc expanded May 1.

The failure of reunification efforts in Cyprus prevented Turkish from joining the list, since the EU recognizes only the Greek-speaking part of the island, and Greece is already a member.

Preparations for the enlargement had already left the EU with a translation backlog of 60,000 pages by the end of April, Mamer said. Without action, that would increase to 300,000 over the next three years, the EU’s head office warned.

The EU was forced to acknowledge recently that two new laws to regulate financial services readied this month will not be formally adopted until autumn because of delays in translating them into the 20 official languages.

In a statement, the EU’s head office said demand for translation had been growing at a rate of 5.3 percent a year even before the expansion, with 1.48 million pages translated last year by the commission’s 2,400 translators.