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Not being particularly clued-in on Dutch political rhetoric it is hard to judge. But it is clear that this wound is open, and is not disappearing. I don’t doubt that even though many are talking of a ‘constitutional crisis’, some compromise or other will be put together. My bigger question is just how much farther down this road can you go before things do finally get serious. The Netherlands is, as I have previously suggested, the ‘odd man out’ in the euro group. You cannot keep raising the temperature a notch on each occasion before something finally gives. So what we perhaps ought to be asking ourselves, is how long have we got left before push really does come to shove? This week battle is to be joined, and according to the Financial Times:

Germany and France will on Monday night join forces in a last-ditch legal attempt to save themselves from the full impact of the EU’s budget rules…………….

German government lawyers claim it would be possible to strike a deal where Berlin and Paris agreed to take further measures if the Commission promised not to make binding policy recommendations. “The Commission must ask itself whether it wants to knowingly wreck the stability pact through an excessively rigid interpretation of the rules,” said a German government official. The legality of the move was being explored over the weekend before a two-day meeting of EU finance ministers that begins on Monday night in Brussels. Commission officials say that if the German move were successful, although illegal, it would inflict incalculable damage to the stability pact. “We have probably never been in such a serious situation,” one said.

While EU Business reminds us that it is not only Zalm who is raising the temperature:

Swedish Finance Minister Bosse Ringholm slammed France Thursday for its excessive public deficit, saying the situation Paris was in was not exceptional. “France is not in an exceptional situation, France is in a situation for which it is itself responsible,” the TT news agency quoted Ringholm as saying after a meeting of the parliament’s European affairs commission.

France faces a vote Tuesday by European Union economic and finance ministers on a European Commission recommendation that Paris cut its structural deficit by six billion euros (seven billion dollars) in 2004 in a bid to get its deficit under 3.0 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) “France is in a situation that it should be able to resolve rather easily. They could postpone (planned) tax cuts,” the Swedish finance minister said. Along with Germany, France is on course to breach the EU Stability and Growth Pact’s ceiling on public deficits — 3.0 percent of GDP — for three years running next year. Ringholm and Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Person have repeatedly criticized Paris for lax fiscal policies that have also been cited as one reason Swedes rejected the single European currency in a September 15 referendum.

Stockholm forecasts a public surplus equivalent to 0.5 percent of GDP in 2004, following a 0.2-percent surplus this year. Earlier Thursday, Dutch Finance Minister Gerrit Zalm defended the stability pact, warning of a crisis if countries flout rules for budgetary rigor contained in the 1997 agreement. “If it were the case that (France and Germany) ignored the pact and the Maastricht treaty… we will have a serious constitutional crisis,” Zalm told As finance minister Zalm pushed through highly unpopular measures such as spending cuts on healthcare, pensions and social security to meet the EU rules. “When it becomes evident that you are not complying with international agreements, it begs the question what the EU is worth,” Zalm warned.

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The thing is, working this way raises certain problems. The first is that the bigger you are, the more you can offer your translators plenty of work and the less money they’ll demand as a result. Size matters. Second, you have to offer certain additional services, because when different translators handle your work, the results can be inconsistent. The best translators are generally not very specialised in a single field, so two different translators may not all use the same terminology for the same translation job. It’s usually better to make sure that the same translator does all of your work if possible, but the essence of this business model is that we can’t promise you that will happen. There are ways of addressing this latter problem, but unless you’re really interested in translation theory and computer-human interaction, they’re not very interesting. Dealing with these issues is basically what I’m paid to do.

The ability to charge less for translation, and to invest in technologies that enhance translation productivity and quality, depends quite closely on the size of your firm. As recently as the early 90’s, it was still rare to find pan-European translation firms. The translation market in the EU wasn’t very integrated, and as a result, firms tended to be fairly small. The large, integrated markets - the US and Japan - are monolingual; they don’t do very much translation.

Now, things are different. Translation in Europe gets contracted more and more on a continent-wide basis. The possibility of large, integrated translation firms is much more real. If we relied exclusively on the Belgian market, we could not justify the capital spent on us or the money we’ve poured into technology development. We’re beginning to make real progress in raising productivity in this industry. This has only become possible because of European integration.

So, let me offer you a bit of investment advice: We’re going to need that increase in productivity very badly, because the demand for translation services is growing. Precise figures on this industry are hard to come by, but estimates of its size range from EUR10 billion to EUR30 billion in annual revenue. The common consensus is that this industry is seeing rapid growth despite the current global economic downturn. And, in the next decade, it’s going to grow at an incredible pace.

Let me explain why:

1. The expansion of the European Union is acting as a stimulus to growth in this industry. The ten new members have eight new official languages, not counting Maltese, on top of the existing eleven, not counting Irish, Letzeburgish and Catalan. This does not just mean that EU official documents have to be translated, it means that manufacturers who are going to start exporting to those countries also have to translate mountains of information, from instruction manuals to maintenance guides to regulatory declarations.
2. The decline in the value of the US dollar means that American firms that have not exported very much in the past will begin to do so. American companies don’t do translation. Many of them - the kinds of small and medium sized firms for whom the falling dollar is a big opportunity - many of them have never exported. They don’t know about language and don’t want to know, and they are going to want some single firm to come along and take care of all their language problems for one price.
3. Rapid growth in key developing markets - India, China, southeast Asia and Russia in particular - is also a factor in the rising fortunes of the translation industry. Each one has its own language laws and regulatory requirements, and even less ability to use documents in English than most European states.
4. The regulatory environment in the EU is the biggest reason to be bullish on the translation industry. With tighter integration, the European Commission and the EU member states themselves are increasingly explicit about language requirements in labelling, documentation and government submissions. These requirements tend to increase rather than reduce translation requirements, and this trend shows no evidence of abating.

One particularly good example of this last point is the EU directive 98/79/EC, covering a variety of medical devices. When it goes into full effect on December 7, 2003, it will require virtually all medical technology vendors to receive the “CE” label before being able to distribute their products anywhere in the EU. Obtaining this label means, among other things, complying with the language and labelling regulations of every single EU member state. Of the current 15 members, nine require all mandatory documentation in their national language and all of them require it for at least some of the documentation. The new members will doubtless make similar impositions.

The new European Patent Office is also an excellent example of how regulatory requirements are driving companies to spend more on translation. The new system streamlines the process of obtaining a Europe-wide patent and lowers the price dramatically. However, it has not eliminated the need to translate patents into whatever languages the member states individually mandate. The initial patent application can be in English, French or German, but once the patent is issued, a translation has to be prepared and deposited with each of the national patent offices, in whatever form and language they require. Twenty-two of the twenty-seven contracting states mandate that the whole of the patent be translated, one state requires only that one section be translated, and the remaining four states have not yet published regulations regarding European patents.

These translations aren’t examined - the EPO examines the original application and unless someone challenges them, the rest are taken as accepted. You need only pay a filing fee of €50 to €100 in each member country. This is negligible compared to the price of filing a patent for examination (~€50,000), so the total cost of a European patent is now far, far smaller than it used to be. Many more firms will take out European patents than before. But, the translation load is even larger under the EPO scheme than back when you would only file patents in a few countries.

There is also more and more reason to see product liability as a motive for document and translation quality control. A rather infamous train accident at Paris’ Gare de Lyon in 1988 focused attention on layout and structure as a factor in text comprehensibility. French investigators ruled that the accident had been caused primarily by the failure to use clear layout in maintenance documentation, leading to incorrect servicing and ultimately to the deaths of 56 people. I don’t know of any comparable case involving a poor written translation, but it is only a matter of time before this issue is gruesomely highlighted.

EU regulations already make poor translations subject to product liability law. Although in principle the translator can be held liable for poor quality work, in practice this virtually never occurs. However, clients who commission and distribute bad translations are at present strictly liable. Manufacturing and service regulations focus more and more on issues of quality rather than specifications, and semi-voluntary standards like ISO-9000 focus heavily on quality issues. This means that not only will having translations matter, it will matter more and more that they be good translations. Good translations cost more than cheap ones.

This is why economic integration is going to make the translation industry much more productive and much larger in a decade than it is today. It is why integration - and not just free trade in the form of eliminating duties on imports - is worth pursuing.

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I can manage to work up one or two pointers which might get us back on track. You see, the interesting question to ask would be about how I got to meet Henry. And the answer would be that I found him because he linked to me (I normally follow new links back upstream to have a quick gander at just who might be crazy enough…..), and he linked to me because, for some reason I still haven’t fathomed, he got interested in my Indian Tech friend Rajesh, and this somehow sent him over to me.

Now I’m starting to get used to things like this, but when it first started happening, it was, I think, little short of mind blowing. Someone from Brazil, living in NY, zooms through Mumbai only to end up on top of my desk in Barcelona. Not only that, but it turns out we have a number of things in common. What I think I’m trying to say is that if this has never happened to you, it’s very hard to describe how you feel. My wife continually tells me that she can see from my face that something interesting has been happening, but beyond that there is no other external sign. She complains she has no way of telling what is important and what isn’t anymore. And the net is like this. Those of us who are in just can’t find any reasonable way of conveying the sensations to those who aren’t. The only strategy would seem to be preparing an experiential explanation - like one of those Borges maps which gives a more detailed specification than the space it is describing - which could offer a large as life version of the net itself. An astronaut must have similar problems after the flight.

And this brings me back to the core of this post. What I find is that my very conception of human contact - whether European or any other - is changing, and part of that change has to do with the loss of place, of physical location, as a determinant. I would say I had now a lot more friends, or people who I consider to be friends, than I had when I started blogging. But the strange thing about my new ‘friends’ is that in the majority of cases I neither know what they look like, nor have I ever heard their voice. I think it’s worse: I think I’m getting to like it like this. In some ways you could say the contact is ‘purer’: you have less to go on, you form your opinion without visual or auditory information, you get to use your imagination more. It is in a way a bit like reading a novel, and imagining the characters, simply by going on the author’s description and what he has them say. And yet, the strangest thing of all, I have the feeling I know the person I am communicating with, that I can like, or dislike them, just as I can like or dislike people in the physical world. Weird.

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Well, somewhere around Iceland, the Northern Lights flared up because of the giant sunspot that’s going on right now, and I pointed this out to a few people who rushed to the windows to see. Then, I used the opportunitiy to talk up one of the Amish passengers who went to look.

It turns out that the Swiss Reformed Church invited them to Zurich as part of a reconcilliation effort. You see, the Zwinglians - the founders of the Swiss Reform movement - were the reason the Amish are in America at all. At one time, you could be executed in the Holy Roman Empire for being an Anabaptist like the Amish. The whole history is long and complicated, and frankly not terribly interesting. However, it seems that some form of apology is in the offing.

Why does this matter? For the most part it doesn’t. The Amish aren’t a terribly big group, and the Swiss Reformed Church is just another Protestant sect in a world full of Protestant sects. However, it is an indicator that, at least among non-fundamentalist Protestants, the ecumenical movement is still pretty strong. The Amish are unusually remote and have no important political base. Reconciling with them can only mean a fairly genuine intention to reconcile with everyone who might be viewed as sharing some common values.

This kind of strategy makes a certain amount of sense when you look at how religious politics work in Europe. Nowadays, the Anglicans and the Lutherans have more in common with each other than with mainstream agnosticism or fundamentalism. I notice here in Belgium, for example, a lot of “generic” Protestant churches without specific doctrinal affiliations. In America, the denomination names are much less important than they used to be, but the differences between conservative and liberal churches are very strong and getting stronger. I don’t see much Protestant fundamentalism in Europe, so is it possible that the distinctions within Protestantism are just disappearing here? Does this have an impact on Europe’s remaining state churches?

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In the short term, this election is unlikely to have much of an effect on the rest of Europe - the Conservatives’ policy towards EU matters is unlikely to change greatly whoever becomes the leader (the Europhile Ken Clarke is unlikely to run, let alone win after his two previous defeats) - but the plight of the Conservative Party does mirror that of the other parties, both left and right, who dominated European politics in the 80s and 90s. Many parties had extended periods in office, but were then swept out in the mid to late 90s, often in landslide elections, and many continue to find it hard to mount effective opposition today - the obvious examples are the French Socialists and various Italian parties, though Spain’s PSOE and Germany’s Free Democrats (if not the CDU/CSU) also fit the pattern.

There has been discussion in Britain of the possibility of a ‘realignment’ of British politics with the currently third placed Liberal Democrats (full disclosure: the party I belong to) passing the Conservatives to become the Opposition. While many Conservatives dismiss this as an unlikely scenario, there are precedents from Europe (and, of course, Canada) of seemingly dominant parties collapsing in a short time. Realignment is occurring in many European countries - there would be a certain irony if the process in Britain occurs because of the actions of the most Eurosceptic of the major parties.

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The current arrangement certainly seems excessively complicated. As I understand it (and I didn’t look it up so I may be wrong) Denmark, the Netherlands, Spain, France and the UK all have areas which fall under their national sovereignty, but outside the EU. I think all the remaining Portuguese territories are within the EU, since Macao was handed over to China. Some areas are outside the EU for tax purposes, but able to obtain structural funds anyway. Some overseas areas enjoy special trading status with the EU, others are fully part of the EU, and still others are treated exactly the same as foreign states for trade purposes. Several have their own currencies, some tied to the Euro, some to the dollar. Three of Britain’s Caribbean colonies are part of a different economic union. I think citizens of all the remaining European overseas territories have the right to abode in the EU, although I’m not sure about Aruba and the Netherlands Antilles.

I hate to suggest it in these terms, but perhaps the EU ought to have some sort of colonial affairs office. Of course, we wouldn’t call it that. “External territories” might be the way to go. Still, it might make sense to outline whether people in these territories have the right to appeal before the ECJ, and just what terms they have to accept in order to get EU aid and structural funds.

I note, with some small amusement, that there is already a nation outside the EU that seems willing to accept that kind of pseudo-colonial status. Cape Verde wants access to European structural funds, and apparently Spain and Portugal are willing to entertain the idea. Since there already seems to be an Europe à deux vitesses within the EU, perhaps there is room for an Europe à trois vitesses. Perhaps there are other states that might be interested in a similar sort of deal? Like Cape Verde, much of northern Africa already has a currency bound to the Euro and “special relationships” with their former colonial powers, France in particular, and indirectly with the EU.

This leads me to think that maybe there needs to be a debate on the idea of a peripheral Europe? To some degree, it already exists in the overseas colonies and a few highly EU-dependent peripheral states. It would probably be impossible to avoid the label of colonialism, but considering how central the EU has become to some of these places’ economies, it just might be better to drag the whole thing out into the open.

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