Eu seeks more English translators

1. The European Commission has launched a recruitment drive for native English speakers, predicting a serious shortage of interpreters.

The demand for mother-tongue English translators is fuelled by the fact that it has replaced French as the “lingua franca” of the EU’s civil service. EU bodies risk losing about half of their English-language interpreters in the next 10 years, the commission says. Many native-English linguists were recruited from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s after the UK and the Irish Republic joined the EU. But the commission says that as they reach retirement age they are not being replaced at the same rate. They are looking to recruit about 300 English “native speaker conference interpreters” within the next 10 years.

2. It acknowledges that it faces competition from UN bodies for top linguists. “There is a tangible deficit in the number of English booth interpreters available... at peak times,” it says.

EU institutions employ an army of interpreters to cope with the needs of the 27-nation bloc. The European Parliament alone employs up to 1,000 interpreters for its full sessions. With 506 possible language combinations the interpreters often work via a third, or ”relay”, language, such as English.

The EU has put a video clip describing the role on the YouTube video-sharing website, to interest young English speakers in interpreting.

The commission says there is also a shortage of Romanian, Latvian and Maltese interpreters.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/7900276.stm

Упр. 6. Переведите с листа, используя стратегию прогнозирования (антиципации), при необходимости пользуясь подсказками внизу текста.

Wanted: English speakers with fluency in sarcasm

There is a critical shortage of interpreters with adequate skills in their mother tongue. Why? Peter Kingston reports.

1. What is the Russian for “sub-prime mortgage”? Anyone? Most of us will never know, which is just as well because Russian apparently has yet to coin a word or phrase for this risky brand of loan.

But the question is being tossed out to a bunch of young people who do need to come up with an answer to this, indeed to any linguistic riddle thrown at them, and they have to do so instantly.

The eight sitting around the table in this Russian session at Leeds University with various shades of alert anxiety on their faces are training for an occupation in crisis. They want to be interpreters.

Of all the lubricants of international affairs, interpreting is most crucial, which makes the shortage of people who can do it is so serious. A proliferation of post-war international organisations such as the UN and the EU fuelled a demand for multilingual interpreters, says Dr Svetlana Carsten, director of the interpreting postgraduate programme at Leeds. A decent flow of applicants emerged to take up these jobs from the earliest university interpreting courses set up in the 1960s.

Retirement is looming for this generation but latterly there simply haven’t been the numbers coming through to replace them. The average age of the interpreters working at the European commission in Brussels, for instance, is now over 58, and this at a time when the numbers of languages spoken at meetings there has reached 23.

“More and more people are claiming their language rights,” says Brian Fox, director of interpretation at the commission. “The Welsh, for instance, have contacted us about the possibility of having Welsh interpreting. Irish was added a couple of years ago and the Spanish government has requested Basque, Galician and Catalan.” The biggest demand, however, is for interpreters who have English as their first language and fluency in two others.