The OECD and the French language at Catallaxy Files

The OECD and the French language

The French get a lot of benefits from having the OECD based in Paris. A continual stream of conference visitors flood into Paris, happily spending their money on hotels, food, entertainment, gifts and so forth. Most of these visitors are funded by their governments. Then there are the 2500 permanent employees, various consultants and contractors – a small army of highly paid individuals funded by the 34 member countries. Overall the OECD must be a significant net benefit to France.

There are two official languages used in the OECD: English and French. All meetings are interpreted simultaneously into French and English; all documents are translated into French and English.

The financial accounts of the OECD do not disclose the full cost to the organisation of operating with two official languages, except one note that the interpretation and translation of conferences was €5.6 million in 2011. I understand about 10 to 15 per cent of the staff of the OECD are employed as translators/interpreters.

I’ve been to a number of OECD meetings over the years – everyone speaks in English except the French delegate. Friends tell me the same: almost universally it is only the French delegate who insists in speaking French, all others will use English.

Similarly, almost all documents are written in English and subsequently translated into French.

In effect a French indulgence is costing the other members a very large amount of money and causing delays with the need for the translation of documents.

This is an indulgence that the other members cannot afford, nor should they tolerate. If the French delegation wish to continue this charade of insisting on French translations and interpretations, it should pay 100 per cent of those costs.

The 33 other member countries should decide to withdraw funding for interpretation and translation.

Note: of course the cost of translation and interpretation is much more in the European Commission – there are 23 official and working languages. Around 25 per cent of the EC’s staff work in translation and interpretation. Linguistic diversity is a key principle of the European Union so it would be difficult to argue for a reduction in the number of languages there.

But that argument does not hold for the OECD which comprises members speaking many languages that are not French or English. As noted, it is effectively only the French delegates who insist on speaking French (although privately most are fluent English speakers). Gallic pride certainly has its price – but I don’t see why the other 33 countries should pander to that pride.

Written by Samuel J

October 26th, 2012 at 6:54 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged with Samuel

38 Responses to 'The OECD and the French language'

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Is it any wonder the French believe statism is actually financially sustainable?

Julie put up Milt’s great matrix in the last week which details what human’s naturally do when other people are paying.

Token

26 Oct 12 at 6:58 pm
Le arrogance.
The superseded language of the culturally very fragile…….with good reason.
French is a dead language.

Alfonso

26 Oct 12 at 7:05 pm
Get French out of the Olympics as well. It is a mystery to me how French ever came to be adopted at an international level. It certainly is no longer necessary. If anything Mandarin should be substituted. Perhaps it is time for the OECD to find a new home?

Super D

26 Oct 12 at 7:08 pm
Merde! Fucking Parisians.

There are few quite so parochial.

Just think of President Chirac – in reality just another corrupt mayor of Paris right to the bitter end.

JamesK

26 Oct 12 at 7:12 pm
Ce n’est pas uniquement le OECD. Il y a également tout les agences de l’ONU (UNESCO, WHO, UNHCR) qui fonctionne en français et en anglais aussi. Des fois l’arabe et le russe aussi.

Quelle horreur!

Papachango

26 Oct 12 at 7:19 pm
Same scam for the Olympics…

ar

26 Oct 12 at 7:21 pm
I actually love France, but they are living in this deluded state of overblown self importance, when really they ceased to be important in world affairs decades ago. It’s all a bit sad really.

tbh

26 Oct 12 at 7:26 pm
…deluded state of overblown self importance…

Just like Bob Carr and Australia’s ridiculous UNSC bid.

jupes

26 Oct 12 at 7:38 pm
And we thought the issue was fixed at Waterloo, 1812….mais non, l’emperor is making ze last laff, n’est ce pas?

Louis Hissink

26 Oct 12 at 7:51 pm
Le arrogance.

L’arrogance?

Gareth Hamilton

26 Oct 12 at 8:07 pm
由中國語言是法語的時間要更換

Samuel J

26 Oct 12 at 8:24 pm
My bad …… but you get my drift, eh Gary.

Alfonso

26 Oct 12 at 8:33 pm
The most recent estimate I have (from interviews) for the annual cost of translation in the OECD is €26m.

While this is overwhelmingly a French issue, in fairness it should be said that it also is of some benefit to Luxembourg, Switzerland and Belgium (and perhaps a little for some Canadians).

My favourite anecdote concerns the demand for translation from the French member of a committee who was indeed fluent in English. Rather than delay proceedings, the Australian member translated to and from French.

This is French government policy. Chirac famously led a walkout from an EU meeting where the (French) leader of the business delegation said he would address the meeting in English, which he regarded as the language of international business.

The situation in the EU is one of ‘mutually assured destruction.’ Each member state is entitled to translation in to its official language. There is no restriction to six official languages as in the UN. ANy meeting with simultaneous translation into all EU languages is horrendously expensive, so English has become the lingua franca, and apparently the Germans are under instruction to ask for translation should the French do so, so this can destroy any meeting.

French is, of course, a less efficient language that English, and having read several thousand OECD bilingual documents, on microfilm, PDF and paper, I have yet to see one where the French text is shorter than the English.

With Spain, Mexico and Chile as members there is a mounting case for other languages, which might make French appear even more redundant.

Having said all that, translation services are a relatively minor part of the OECD budget.

The activities of the OECD are much understood – for example Judith Sloan’s piece in the Oz a couple of weeks back, which was based on essentially two observations, one 20 years old. Like any IO, it has its questionable aspects, but has done (and continues to do) some good and influential work. Though it is greatly understood.

Aynsley Kellow

26 Oct 12 at 8:45 pm
Ce n’est pas uniquement le OECD. Il y a également tout les agences de l’ONU (UNESCO, WHO, UNHCR) qui fonctionne en français et en anglais aussi.

Et n’oublie pas l’Eurovision !

Dangph

26 Oct 12 at 9:25 pm
It is a beautiful language, French.

I haven’t met a Frenchman I particularly liked though and I have no compelling urge to visit there (other than Tahiti again, which is a whole ‘nother thing – paradise!).

I don’t know why the krauts don’t threaten to invade again, to pull ‘em into line. The arrogant little surrender monkeys would fold like a pack of cards.

Mick Gold Coast QLD

26 Oct 12 at 9:25 pm
由中國語言是法語的時間要更換

So French should be replaced by Chinese?

Daisy

26 Oct 12 at 10:18 pm
Most native English speakers are monolingual. We only speak English, and we haven’t really internalized the idea that the rest of the world speaks and functions in other languages. We often think that if they don’t speak English, they are deficient in some way.

In light of that, it’s not such a bad idea to have another language besides English as an official language at international organizations, even if that just stands as a reminder that the anglosphere doesn’t constitute the entire world.

If you were to pick a second official language, which one would you pick? Mandarin is no good because even though it has many native speakers, it isn’t known by many others.

French is not such a bad choice.

This guy ranks the top 10 languages in terms of influence, and French comes second after English which comes first: http://www.andaman.org/BOOK/reprints/weber/rep-weber.htm

His metrics are of course rather arbitrary, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Dangph

26 Oct 12 at 10:21 pm
They get away with this shit in Canada as well, despite being thrashed there.

Their enemies really have been too honourable. Kill them all, I say, and take all the snails for ourselves! /jk

perturbed

26 Oct 12 at 10:22 pm
So do you eat snails or mussels?

.

26 Oct 12 at 10:28 pm
Gary Brecher has a brilliant, and very humorous, account of all the wars and battles that the cheese-eating surrender monkeys have lost over the ages.

http://www.exile.ru/articles/detail.php?ARTICLE_ID=7061&IBLOCK_ID=35

Piett

26 Oct 12 at 10:42 pm
In Europe, there is no reason to have another second language because most of Europe is polyglot and English is an almost-universal second (or third or fourth) language. The only large nation in Europe where French is more commonly spoken than English… is France. Why did German lose out?

Now, if there were an African EU, French would certainly be required, as Africa is fairly well split between English and French as official and second languages.

wreckage

26 Oct 12 at 11:10 pm
The one satisfaction is that the French banks and taxpayers will ultimately bear a large part of the cost of Greek default.

Sleetmute

26 Oct 12 at 11:27 pm
Mr piett

Did you actually read your link? – it’s a paen to the French.

Peter Whiteford

26 Oct 12 at 11:34 pm
Mick, I too love the French language but am woefully out of practice. My Dad’s family are French speaking Belgians and listening to someone speak it fluently is one of life’s great pleasures. I will say that I’ve met many French people whose company I’ve enjoyed immensely.

Dangph, you are right that many English speakers are fairly monolingual, but it’s been made pretty easy for us through the massive influence of Anglo Saxon culture and business/trade through the world (mostly for the better IMHO). I encourage my kids to speak more than one language and it just so happens that they are learning French at school right now.

tbh

27 Oct 12 at 12:51 am
Shh, Peter W, it’s my cunning plan, as Baldrick would say, to get the French-haters to read it and make their heads explode!

Piett

27 Oct 12 at 1:02 am
I agree with the post but that graphic is total bullshit, as Gary Brecher proved a few years ago.

Abu Chowdah

27 Oct 12 at 1:52 am
The French
by GARY BRECHER
The new big thing on the web is all these sites with names like “I Hate France,” with supposed datelines of French military history, supposedly proving how the French are total cowards. If you want to see a sample of this dumbass Frog bashing, try this:

http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/text/france.html

Well, I’m going to tell you guys something you probably don’t want to
hear: these sites are total bullshit, the notion that the French are cowards is total bullshit, and anybody who knows anything about European military history knows damn well that over the past thousand years, the French have the most glorious military history in Europe, maybe the world.

Before you send me more of those death threats, let me finish. I hate
Chirac too, and his disco foreign minister with the blow-dry ‘do and
the snotty smile. But there are two things I hate more than I hate the
French: ignorant fake war buffs, and people who are ungrateful. And when an American mouths off about French military history, he’s not just being ignorant, he’s being ungrateful. I was raised to think ungrateful people were trash.

When I say ungrateful, I’m talking about the American Revolution. If
you’re a true American patriot, then this is the war that matters. Hell, most of you probably couldn’t name three major battles from it, but try going back to when you read Johnny Tremaine in fourth grade and you might recall a little place called Yorktown, Virginia, where we bottled up Cornwallis’s army, forced the Brits’ surrender and pretty much won the war.

Well, news flash: “we” didn’t win that battle, any more than the Northern Alliance conquered the Taliban. The French army and navy won Yorktown for us. Americans didn’t have the materiel or the training to mount a combined operation like that, with naval blockade and land siege. It was the French artillery forces and military engineers who ran the siege, and at sea it was a French admiral, de Grasse, who kicked the shit out of the British navy when they tried to break the
siege.

Long before that, in fact as soon as we showed the Brits at Saratoga that we could win once in a while, they started pouring in huge shipments of everything from cannon to uniforms. We’d never have got near Yorktown if it wasn’t for massive French aid.

So how come you bastards don’t mention Yorktown in your cheap webpages? I’ll tell you why: because you’re too ignorant to know about
it and too dishonest to mention it if you did.

The thing that gets to me is why Americans hate the French so much
when they only did us good and never did us any harm. Like, why not hate the Brits? They’re the ones who killed thousands of Americans in the Revolution, and thirty years later they came back and attacked us again. That time around they managed to burn Washington DC to the ground while they were at it. How come you web jerks never mention that?

Sure, the easy answer is because the Brits are with us now, and the French aren’t. But being a war buff means knowing your history and respecting it.

Well, so much for ungrateful. Now let’s talk about ignorant. And that’s what you are if you think the French can’t fight: just plain ignorant. Appreciation of the French martial spirit is just about the most basic way you can distinguish real war nerds from fake little Teachers’ pets.

Let’s take the toughest case first: the German invasion, 1940, when the French Army supposedly disgraced itself against the Wehrmacht. This is the only real evidence you’ll find to call the French cowards, and the more you know about it, the less it proves. Yeah, the French were scared of Hitler. Who wasn’t? Chamberlain, the British prime
minister, all but licked the Fuhrer’s goosesteppers, basically let him have all of Central Europe, because Britain was terrified of war with Germany. Hell, Stalin signed a sweetheart deal with Hitler out of sheer terror, and Stalin wasn’t a man who scared easy.

The French were scared, all right. But they had reason to be. For starters, they’d barely begun to recover from their last little scrap with the Germans: a little squabble you might’ve heard of, called WW I.

WW I was the worst war in history to be a soldier in. WW II was worse
if you were a civilian, but the trenches of WW I were five years of Hell like General Sherman never dreamed of. At the end of it a big chunk of northern France looked like the surface of the moon, only bloodier, nothing but craters and rats and entrails.

Verdun. Just that name was enough to make Frenchmen and Germans, the
few who survived it, wake up yelling for years afterward. The French lost 1.5 million men out of a total population of 40 million fighting the Germans from 1914-1918. A lot of those guys died charging German
machine-gun nests with bayonets. I’d really like to see one of you office smartasses joke about “surrender monkeys” with a French soldier, 1914 vintage. You’d piss your dockers.

Shit, we strut around like we’re so tough and we can’t even handle a
few uppity Iraqi villages. These guys faced the Germans head on for five years, and we call them cowards? And at the end, it was the Germans, not the French, who said “calf rope.”

When the sequel war came, the French relied on their frontier fortifications and used their tanks (which were better than the Germans’, one on one) defensively. The Germans had a newer, better offensive strategy. So they won. And the French surrendered. Which was damn sensible of them.

This was the WEHRMACHT. In two years, they conquered all of Western
Europe and lost only 30,000 troops in the process. That’s less than the casualties of Gettysburg. You get the picture? Nobody, no army on earth, could’ve held off the Germans under the conditions that the French faced them. The French lost because they had a long land border with Germany. The English survived because they had the English Channel between them and the Wehrmacht. When the English Army faced the Wermacht at Dunkirk, well, thanks to spin the tuck-tail-and-flee
result got turned into some heroic tale of a brilliant British retreat. The fact is, even the Brits behaved like cowards in the face of the Wermacht, abandoning the French. It’s that simple.

Here’s a quick sampler of some of my favorite French victories, like an antidote to those ignorant websites. We’ll start way back and move up to the 20th century.

Tours, 732 AD: The Muslims had already taken Spain and were well on
their way to taking the rest of Europe. The only power with a chance of stopping them was the French army under Charles “the Hammer” Martel, King of the Franks (French), who answered to the really cool nickname “the Hammer of God.” It was the French who saved the continent’s ass. All the smart money was on the Muslims: there were 60,000 of them, crazy Jihadis whose cavalry was faster and deadlier than any in Europe. The French army was heavily outnumbered and had no cavalry. Fighting in phalanxes, they held against dozens of cavalry charges and after at least two days of hand-to-hand combat, finally managed to hack their way to the Muslim center and kill their commander. The Muslims retreated to Spain, and Europe developed as an independent civilization.

Orleans, May 1429: Joan of Arc: is she the most insanely cool military
commander in history or what? This French peasant girl gets instructions from her favorite saints to help out the French against the English invaders. She goes to the King (well, the Dauphin, but close enough) and tells him to give her the army and she’ll take it from there. And somehow she convinces him. She takes the army, which has lost every battle it’s been in lately, to Orleans, which is under
English siege. Now Joan is a nice girl, so she tries to settle things peaceably. She explains in a letter to the enemy commanders that everything can still be cool, “provided you give up France – and go back to your own countries, for God’s sake. And if you do not, wait
for the Maid, who will visit you briefly to your great sorrow.” The
next day she put on armor, mounted a charger, and prepared to lead the
attack on the besiegers’ fortifications. She ordered the gates opened, but the Mayor refused until Joan explained that she, personally, would cut off his head. The gates went up, the French sallied out, and Joan led the first successful attack they’d made in years. The English strongpoints were taken, the siege was broken, and Joan’s career in the cow-milking trade was over.

Braddock’s Defeat (aka Battle of Monongahela) July 1755: Next time
you’re driving through the Ohio Valley, remember you’re passing near the site of a great French victory over an Anglo-American force twice its size. General Edward Braddock marched west from Virginia with 1,500 men- a very large army in 18th-c. America. His orders were to seize French land and forts in the Valley�your basic undeclared land-grab invasion. The French joined the local tribes to resist, and then set up a classic ambush. It was a slaughter. More than half of
Braddock’s force – 880 men – were killed or wounded. The only Anglo
officer to escape unhurt was this guy called George Washington, and even he had two horses shot out from under him. After a few minutes of non-stop fire from French and Indians hidden in the woods, Braddock’s command came apart like something out of Nam, post-Tet. Braddock was hit and wounded, but none of his troops would risk getting shot to rescue him.

Austerlitz, Dec. 1805: You always hear about Austerlitz as “Napoleon’s
Greatest Victory,” like the little guy personally went out and wiped out the combined Russian and Austrian armies. The fact is, ever since the Revolution in 1789, French armies had been kicking ass against everybody. They were free citizens fighting against scared peasant and degenerate mercenaries, and it was no contest. At Austerlitz, 65,000 French troops took on 90,000 Russians and Austrians and destroyed them. Absolutely annihilated them. The French lost only 8,000, compared to 29,000 of the enemy. The tactics Bonaparte used were very risky, and would only have worked with superb troops: he encouraged the enemy to attack a weak line, then brought up reinforcements who’d been held out of sight. That kind of tactical plan takes iron discipline and perfect timing – and the French had it.

Jena, Oct. 1806: just a quick reminder for anybody who thinks the Germans always beat the French. Napoleon takes on the Prussian army and destroys it. 27,000 Prussian casualties vs. 5,000 French. Prussian army routed, pursued for miles by French cavalry.

You eXile guys might want to remember that the French under Napoleon are still the only army ever to have taken all of continental Europe, from Moscow to Madrid. I could keep listing French victories till I had a book. In fact, it’s not a bad idea. A nice big hardback, so you could take it to the assholes running all the anti-French-military sites and bash their heads in with it.

Abu Chowdah

27 Oct 12 at 2:08 am
So now, please hate on the French, but don’t embarrass yourself by posting ignorant shit about their martial history.

Abu Chowdah

27 Oct 12 at 2:10 am
Abu Chunder – Crecy, Agincourt, Trafalgar, Waterloo – these are not where the French had insuperable military advantages as they enjoyed against the faltering Hapsburgs, or the massive outnumbering they enjoyed against the Prussians…who, by the way, thrashed them 65 years later.
Your selective and mischievous use of “history” simply flies in the face of facts man – just grow up and accept reality.

OzExPat

27 Oct 12 at 3:45 am
Heh, the “surrender” graphic has disappeared. France ought to award war nerd Gary Brecher the Ordre national du Mérite for writing that article and helping restore the military reputation of France.

Dangph

27 Oct 12 at 9:45 am
Et n’oublie pas l’Eurovision

oh putain, ne me rappelles pas de cette connerie!

papachango

27 Oct 12 at 10:27 am
Brecher is all very well, but ignores the reality post WWI. After experiencing such a massive bloodbath on home soil, the French military are gun shy. Poor doctrine and poor morale saw them lose the battle for France in WWII and post war, their performance in Indochina showed that they still have little stomach for battle.

Ten years later, Col. Bigeard still believed that with the same number of troops that were available at Dien Bien Phu, but of first-class quality, the French could have survived the battle. “If you had given me 10,000 SS troopers,” said Bigeard to this writer ten years after the battle, “we’d have held out.”
p. 453 of Hell in Very Small Place

Cold-Hands

27 Oct 12 at 10:54 am
oh putain, ne me rappelles pas de cette connerie!

L’Eurovision fait beaucoup plus de bien pour l’humanité que l’ONU

Dangph

27 Oct 12 at 11:05 am
lol… Dangph… douze points!

papachango

27 Oct 12 at 12:27 pm
To oubliez or not to oubliez

C’est la question

JamesK

27 Oct 12 at 12:43 pm
Brecher is all very well, but ignores the reality post WWI. After experiencing such a massive bloodbath on home soil, the French military are gun shy. Poor doctrine and poor morale saw them lose the battle for France in WWII and post war, their performance in Indochina showed that they still have little stomach for battle.

But the same comments could be made about many other nations who have been emasculated over recent decades. Look at what the ALP is doing to defence

Abu Chowdah

27 Oct 12 at 3:32 pm
Glad to see the graphic has gone. Brecher’s book is available from Amazon.

Abu Chowdah

27 Oct 12 at 3:33 pm
Actually if you watch carefully the French have been involved in very aggressive action, particularly in Africa. It just doesn’t get reported if you aren’t listening to the BBC world service while on late shift.

wreckage

28 Oct 12 at 4:42 pm

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