Thank your lucky stars
Now we’ve all been there haven’t we? We arrive at work (or start work at home), we grab that first cup of coffee in the morning and then either have a quick whinge to ourselves or to our colleagues about our workload before settling down to the days labours. Well next time, before we start complaining, maybe we should thank our lucky stars that we’re not part of the 200 or so strong linguistic department that works permanently at the EU.
Apparently, they are labouring under such an overwhelming backlog of work that they are barely able to concentrate on current tasks and this has already caused the signing of a major political agreement to be delayed (and probably earned them a good telling off from their bosses). The delayed document was a Stability and Association Agreement (SAA) that was to have put in place further arrangements for the stability of the region; the document is now due to be signed on May 26th 2008.
The backlog has resulted from the EU policy of insisting that copies of the not insubstantial Lisbon Treaty be translated into all 23 of the official EU languages. Now to give you some idea of the length (literally) of the Lisbon Treaty; if you ripped it to pieces (great idea, some would say) and laid the pages end to end, the document would stretch for over 50 km!
So the next time I’m about to launch into a whinge about workload, I’ll be thankful that I’m not an EU interpreter…but then again…50 km of work x 23 languages = enough overtime at ‘double time’ to last for the next 75 years. Nice work if you can get it!