The European Union told its bureaucrats on Wednesday to cut their verbiage in a drive to eliminate translation backlogs exacerbated by the bloc's unprecedented enlargement.
"We encourage our services to write documents that are shorter," Eric Mamer, spokesman for the EU's executive Commission, told a news conference.
With the number of official EU languages having grown to 20 from 11 when the bloc expanded on May 1, the output of translations is bound to increase steeply from the current more than 1.3 million pages annually.
Even before Estonian, Czech, Hungarian, Latvian, Maltese, Lithuanian, Polish, Slovak and Slovene became EU tongues, the Commission was about 7,000 pages behind in translation.
The EU plans to hire at least 1,800 extra translators and interpreters by 2008 at the cost of tens of millions of euros.
Source: Reuters
27.05.2004