9 de enero de 2007

¡Ya somos tres más!

En News4Linguist:

Having just rung in the new year, the European Union has not only become bigger but it has also become three languages richer, bringing the Cyrillic alphabet, another Latin language and the first Celtic one as an EU official language, into the 27-nation bloc.

Bulgarian, Irish and Romanian on Monday (1 January) became the
three new official languages of the EU - raising the number to 23.

"The diversity of languages is our common richness," said EU culture commissioner Jan Figel in one of his last statements in December before handing over part of his portfolio to the new EU multilingualism commissioner from Romania, Leonard Orban.

The union annually spends some €1.1 billion on translation and interpretation – around 1 percent of the EU budget a year – with only a slight increase in cost expected for the three new languages.

This pays for almost 3,000 staff to interpret around 11,000 meetings a year and to translate more than 1.3 million pages of text.

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