WRITTEN QUESTION E-0075/02

by Maurizio Turco (NI) to the Commission

(25 January 2002)

Subject: JICS (Joint Interpreting and Conference Service) working group for the use of the international language Esperanto

The European Commission, through Vice-President Neil Kinnock, asked the JICS (Joint Interpreting and Conference Service) to set up a working group to examine projects on the teaching of Esperanto and consider to what extent it could be used as an intermediary language for interpretation.

In the light of the above:

- On what date was this request submitted to the JICS? Has the working group been activated? If so, when? Who are its members and what are their qualifications? On the basis of what criteria were they selected?

- Has the group met yet? If so, when? Are there minutes and/or recordings of its meetings? If so, are these public? What publications and studies has the group taken into consideration (e.g. the study published by the Italian Ministry of Education in 1995)?

- What conclusions, if any, has the working group reached? If it has not yet reached any conclusions, when and how does it intend to do so?

Answer given by Mr Kinnock on behalf of the Commission

(12 March 2002)

The Honourable Member refers to the consideration to be given by the Joint Interpreting and Conference Service (SCIC) to the possibility of learning and using Esperanto as a relay language for conference interpretation. SCIC has indeed examined this question internally and with a number of its external partners in university and academic circles.

However, whilst the use of Esperanto as a relay language for interpretation may appear to be attractive at first sight, closer examination has revealed that there are serious practical, financial and technical difficulties.

The Commission is strongly committed to multilingualism in order to facilitate communication among delegates at meetings in the framework of Community activity. Accordingly, it has always sought to provide interpretation from and into as many languages as are needed in a particular meeting, subject to budgetary considerations and the availability of interpreters. The use of various relay languages gives the Commission the necessary flexibility in this respect without having recourse to languages that will not be used by any of the delegates.

As far as SCIC is aware, there are no professionally qualified Esperanto interpreters and educational institutions in Member States, on which SCIC relies for the provision of courses in interpretation, are unlikely to include Esperanto among the languages they provide. For logistical and financial reasons SCIC itself is not in a position to launch a training programme in Esperanto for existing and future interpreters. Training an interpreter to the required standard in an official language for passive use takes three to four years of part-time study and costs about 70 000.

An additional consideration is that about half of the interpretation provided by the Commission is supplied by freelance interpreters. It would clearly be difficult, if not impossible, to ensure that they learnt Esperanto, especially as it would be of little practical value for them elsewhere.

Furthermore, there is no evidence that using Esperanto as a relay language would lead to an improvement in the overall quality of interpretation. On the contrary, recourse to a language that is not used in everyday life would run the risk of not being able to convey the full range of messages and ideas communicated during meetings.

There is a shortage of interpreters in many existing and future Community languages. In line with Commission policy of concentrating resources on core activities, SCIC's immediate priority is to ensure that an adequate number of interpreters is available in these languages, particularly those of the candidate countries and has initiated a series of action plans committed to achieving this goal.

This position does not of course detract from the interest Esperanto may represent for purposes other than interpretation.