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| Do you know your Bulgarian?Or your АБВГД?By Nicholas Newman 14 August 2006Probably not is the answer, but for translators in various European Union institutions, it is increasingly vital to have someone in your organisation that does. Especially, with the prospect of Bulgaria’s accession on 1st January 2007 only months away. For the EU’s Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission (DGT) which employs some 1650 and 550 support staff to translate some 1.3 million pages a year. The recruitment of the extra 60 translators that convert Bulgarian into any of the other 22 operational languages is proving challenging enough, especially with Bulgarian adding Cyrillic as the Union’s third official script after the Latin and Greek alphabets. It is perhaps lucky that 2/3rds of communications within the EU take place in English, German and French, with English becoming the predominant language in this virtual tower of Babel. Adding an additional language is adding additional challenges to the DGT. Take the case of a Bulgarian MEP wishing to hear a Bulgarian translation of what his Swedish colleague is saying in a debate in the European Parliament. The words of his colleague might need to be translated through several languages, which means, at times, the sense of what is being said can be lost. Certainly, the inventors of Cyrillic, Saints Cyril and Methodius never envisaged, a thousand years ago, that it would be used by some 240 million people, from Serbia in the west to the easternmost tip of Russia. Nor That it would be adopted as a script in a new united Europe as a third, official script, after Latin and Greek, nor that would this script be used on computers. In fact, adapting ‘…the alphabet is the easy part’ said Dieter Rummel, head of language technology at the Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union. ‘But is was a big deal ten years ago’ he added. Today, Europe uses Unicode, a character encoding system that allows representation of all alphabets, even Chinese. However it will not be until 2010 before Cyrillic is written on ‘Euro’ banknotes, but as in the ancient times, this script will be working as it did in the past to unite Europe. Putting it simply, there are problems over spelling and finding Bulgarian equivalent terms to many of the words in the EU lexicon. Lets take spelling first, ‘…many Cyrillic letters have no Latin equivalent, or several possibilities,’ notes Public Affairs Minister Nikolay Vassilev, and continues ‘…some Bulgarian cities are spelled seven different ways in Latin – even on signs in the same city.’ To add to these difficulties is finding Bulgarian word equivalents to EU technical jargon such as cohesion, convergence and communitarisation. In many cases the only option is to introduce new words into the Bulgarian vocabulary. ‘There is no other country in the world with a problem of this magnitude,’ said Public Affairs Minister Nikolay Vassilev As a result of these challenges Vassilev has introduced a new transliteration system created by linguists called ‘comprehensive Bulgarian.’ This provides a state approved standardised method for translating 30,000 proper names and geographic names written in Cyrillic, into an approved spelling in Latin. The transliteration software is available free on the ministry’s website. Already the government has issued decrees enforcing approved Latin spellings of names at every level of government. For the country’s Mayors the problems of just updating the signage to meet the new decrees on signage are awesome. In Sofia, alone the cost to the capital’s taxpayers is likely to be 4 million Euro alone in adopting approved bi-lingual signage. It is hoped by Sofia’s Deputy Mayor for transport Velizar Stoilov ‘that EU accession funding will pay for the estimated 800,000 street signs that need replacing?’ To what extent Bulgaria manages to deal with the challenges ahead of accession will demonstrate just one element how Bulgaria achieves its main task of ‘…building a modern nation’ says Christo Matanov Professor of medieval Bulgarian history at Sofia University.
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