Section 44

A paragraph of the article in The Economist magazine entitled BABELLING ON

1. Getting national governments to pick up the tab for using regional languages can keep the costs down.
2. In 2005 the union spent some 1.1 billion euros (1.4 dollars) on translation and interpretation.
   
3. This pays for staff to interpret at 11.000 thousand meetings a year and to translate more than 1.3 m pages of text.
4. One result of the latest enlargement is that the commission has instructed officials to write shorter, snappier communications that cost less to translate.
5. But not all problems are so easy.
6. A plan in 2002 to simplify European patents failed when some countries blocked it because the new patent would be only in English, French and German.
7. Subsequent efforts to find a compromise floundered because of high translation costs. (The Economist, Dec 16th, 2006)
   

The following sections contain the vocabularies about this article.

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