Sir, – Ann Marie Hourihane (March 5th) refers to the “translation scam by which all official documents must be translated into Irish”. It is totally untrue that all official documents must be translated into Irish.
Each year the State produces a huge amount of written material, nearly exclusively in English, in the form of things like legislation, reports, letters, press releases, leaflets, adverts and, increasingly, webpages. It would be difficult to say what percentage of this huge mass is translated into Irish, but judging from my experience as both an Irish-language translator and a member of the public who tries to do as much of his business with the State as possible through Irish, I can say with no hesitation that the figure is very low indeed. I might hazard a guess of 2 per cent.
Even that figure is probably too high.
Perhaps because a small number of documents (eg the final versions of legal Acts, annual reports of State bodies) must indeed, by law, be translated into Irish and because certain visible things like forms and signs are often (but by no means always) bilingual, people have the impression that everything is translated. But we are talking about a drop in the ocean in terms of overall quantity.
The obligations on State bodies to translate into Irish are in fact very light, as a trip to the Government Publications Office in Dublin or a look at the website of a typical State body will confirm.
Readers can make up their own mind as to whether this is too much or too little. – Yours, etc,
Sir, – Is it not time we had a serious debate on a national level about the giant elephant in our closet that is the Irish language? Do we need the Irish language or do we not need it? Do we want it or not want it? Is it not time then that we consider voting on the practicality and feasibility of having two languages?
Ireland now needs to look to the future in a practical and unromantic manner, we need to think what is best for our future generation and not about our ancient generations.
Having mastered the world’s most important language, isn’t it time we focused on mastering the languages of the future? – Yours, etc,