Fishing for insta-links again, Dan?

"...a shortage of translators..."

If taken to mean English-"national language" translators, it doesn't augur well for the short-term economic future of these new EU economies. Business/diplomacy will surely produce tons more pages in need of translation, what then ?

If "EU laws are only enforceable in the new member states when written in the national tongue", perhaps this is intentional, part of a strategy of getting the benefits of EU accession without the pesky need to observe all of the regulations.

Wouldn't work - when the FT says that laws aren't enforceable, it means they're not enforceable against individual citizens. They're still enforceable against the governments, and the state itself can be whacked with fines by the European Court of Justice for failing to bring the laws into effect.

So it's not really in any country's interest to fail to translate the back catalogue of EU law. It's just a genuinely huge and unwieldy exercise.

"EU laws are only enforceable in the new member states when written in the national tongue."

Sounds like a feature, not a bug.

"EU laws are only enforceable in the new member states when written in the national tongue."

Sounds like a feature, not a bug.

A feature when it was introduced in the first place, perhaps. The EEC of 6, with four languages between six states (French, German, Italian, Dutch) is a rather different animal from the EU-23/25.

Q: How many EU ministers does it take to change a light bulb?

A: It would take just one of them, but they can't do it since the EU manual for changing light bulbs hasn't been translated into their native language yet.

;-)

Sounds like a great opportunity to outsource translation services to low cost labor in some of the many former European colonies.

The EU: Where Ignorance of the Law is, indeed, a legal excuse.

Heck . . . why not just defer to the translation in le France? I'm sure it's superior anyway . . .

It is the European way. A law is only really a law when someone needs to use it. It is not like we need police ensuring that we abide by laws, its when laws are broken that they come into play. It looks like a deliberate legal way for the nascent states to fit into the EU without ruffling feathers when they fail the understand the rigorous niceties that cosying up with the French may require or if you want to know, for example, what Mr Blair means exactly. Latitude rules, okay?

See, they should have just stuck with having all the laws written in Latin. 20-20 hindsight, I suppose.

Am I the only one who finds the notion of an 85,000 page rulebook mentally ill? Europe, Deranged since like forever.

What language was it written in originally? Probably English. So just everybody switch to English and we'll all live happily ever after.

If it was written in French, toss it out and start all over again. People who speak a language that has no word for 80 and calls it two times forty and 85 two times forty plus five are insane and can't be trusted with anything as important as the rules for the EU.

This says a lot about what's wrong with the EU. The US Constitution has lasted for more than 200 years and it's only a few pages long.

You are comparing apples to watermelons. Go count the pages to the US Code, or better yet, the regulations to title 26 (the Internal Revenue Code), not to mention the Revenue Rulings, Revenue Procedures, Private Letter Rulings etc. etc.

BTW, eighty in French is four twenties. ;0

Windows users will understand what EU stands for:

Escape, Undo.

The embarrassing disclosure could have serious legal consequences, because EU laws are only enforceable in the new member states when written in the national tongue.

This isn't true. Someone's got the wrong end of the stick here.

erp,

I'm sure you've once received the e-mail with all these jokes about the incongruities of the English language (a few examples below). According to your logic, we should discard English as well and switch to German. Finally, regarding 80: some french speakers don't use 4X20 but instead use either "octante" (Swiss) or "huitante" (Belgian).

Jokes (from Richard Lederer's book, Crazy English):
In what other language do people drive in a parkway and park in a driveway?
Why do they call them apartments when they're all together?
How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites? How can OVERLOOK and OVERSEE be opposites, while QUITE A LOT and QUITE A FEW are alike? ...

:)

The correct comparison would be with the United States Code of Federal Regulations, which is quite large and may be more than 85,000 pages.

More to the point is the wisdom of the Arkansas Traveler. Roof don't leak if it don't rain and I can't fix it if it's raining.

I'm still short the EU.