BRUSSELS: The EU faces a bill of €800 million for translation services, which does not augur well for the request for official status for Irish, writes Honor Mahony.
Ms Anna Zaborska starts to speak. Within seconds, howls of protest come from the floor. "I'm sorry, Lady Speaker, this is not being translated," says an irate Italian MEP. Everyone looks towards the interpreters' booths - the interpreters stare stonily back. It's a technical glitch.
She tries again in her native Slovak. Still no luck. Other MEPs are talking loudly and gesticulating at the interpreters. Having been that very minute elected to chair the Women's Committee, Ms Zaborska, a new MEP, looks frankly panic-stricken. Suddenly, the man in the technician's booth gives the thumbs-up. With a sigh of relief, the chairwoman begins to speak again and the headsets obediently spring into life.
Welcome to the European Parliament. Here it is possible to experience just what it means to be in a European Union of 25 member-states operating in 20 official languages - the United Nations, by contrast, has just six.
Housed in small interpreting booths beside the Committee rooms, the interpreters can be confronted with a huge range of subjects. On any one day they can touch on the intricacies of agricultural policy, details about financial services directives, or the technicalities of employment issues - but their work is crucial as it is in these committees that new EU laws are vetted and adjustments made.
Direct translation of all these languages would be out of the question - the number of possible combinations is almost 400.
As Karl-Johan Lönnroth, the head of the European Commission's translation department, wryly said before EU enlargement: "If you know anybody who can translate from Maltese to Finnish, please let us know."
So corners are cut. Estonian, for example, gets translated into a major language which is then translated into other, small "target" languages - like Hungarian or Latvian.
This means the famous time-lag gets even worse. Jokes and insults tend to go awry in the European Parliament. Part of the reason why debates are so dull in this institution is that by the time a Spaniard has told a joke and a Slovene ventures a laugh, the discussion has long since moved on.
And while the principle behind the EU's very own Tower of Babel is noble - promotion of cultural diversity and democracy, as who can deny the right of a Hungarian citizen to elect a monolingual MEP - naturally it does not come for free, and leads to other complications.
With enlargement, the cost of the Union's translation service is expected to rise from €500 million to €800 million. Even before May 1st, when the EU expanded, problems with translation were becoming apparent. Since then EU officials have been told to be less long-winded.
"We want to encourage absolutely everybody to produce shorter documents," said a Commission spokesman.
Documents are now being limited to 15 pages - otherwise the fear was that the current translation backlog of 60,000 pages would rise to 300,000 in the next years.
In May, two important new financial services directives were delayed by six months due to translation problems.
All of this is so a Maltese speaker, of which there are fewer than 400,000, can read an EU document in their own language.
Is it worth it? Definitely, argues Davyth Hicks, in charge of Eurolang, an agency for minority languages in the EU. "Lack of linguistic diversity has been compared to a decline in biodiversity. When you lose a language, you lose a whole conceptualisation of the world," he says. It is not fair to use economic reasons for not granting people the right to speak their own language, he adds. But while it may not be fair, it is probably one of the arguments that will be used against the Government's push to have Irish accepted as an official language of the EU.
Right now, Irish speakers can write to EU institutions and expect to be answered in their language; and all treaty texts have to be translated into Irish.
But that is as far as it goes. During Ireland's EU presidency, when some journalists posed questions to Mr Brian Cowen in Irish, it was met with consternation. "Is this Gaelic?" a German journalist beside me asked in astonishment. "How are we supposed to understand that?"
But for all the 20 languages of the EUit is really English that counts above all.
Its path to lingua franca status accelerated when Austria, Finland and Sweden joined in 1995 - their predominant second language is English. Francophones watch this development with horror, and hark back to the days when Jacques Delors was running the Commission and French was very much de rigueur.
Now, one of the reasons why France's Commissioner, Mr Jacques Barrot, has been given a relatively small portfolio (transport) is because he can speak only French.
Ireland's request for an official language status for Irish is expected to open the floodgates.
A Spanish minister said recently his government would ask for Catalan, Galician and Basque to be made official languages once Ireland makes its move, expected this autumn.