Time for a poll, I think, what with David Cameron throwing the gatto among the piccioni with his planned referendum on membership of the European Union.
For some of us, EU membership is a business/market access issue, for some it’s all about annoying rules and regulations, and for others it’s emotional — we feel European.
A couple of business issues that would affect translators (and other UK business owners) if Britain left the EU:
would we be able to bid in public-sector tenders in EU countries?
would we be able to register a country-level domain name in EU countries? (in Italy, the answer is “no”)
would English continue to be the (unofficial) working language of the EU, and would we see a decline in the amount of EU-related documents being translated into English? Ireland and Malta have English as one of their official languages, but they’re relatively small. Maybe France would (re)claim linguistic sovereignty.
So have your say here first (and feel free to comment!).
[polldaddy poll=6859466]
With thanks, for the question on English as an EU language, to the students at the MSc in Translation Studies at the University of Glasgow, where I taught a Master Class last week.
By Marian Dougan
One Response
Hi Marion,
Glad to see you raise this after our chat at the masterclass! It’s definitely an issue that could affect my not too distant future as a new translator!
It’ll be interesting to see the results!
Katy