Wouldn’t it be fun to know what common mistakes politicians (along with some translators and, rarely, terminologists) make in English? Their incorrect and misused wording is what people like to call Euro-English. Some of these misused English terms have become emblematic of the EU’s ‘not easily digestible’communication methods towards the citizens. To do away with these Euro-terms would be deemed unnecessarily painful and pointless. Also, it should not be forgotten that official EU communication and decision making is targeted at the native language population of the Union: it is because all documents of the EU are available in all official languages; that is, all English language texts are composed to be easily understandable by all English speaking citizens (like in the case of Maltese, Estonian, etc). This is why we have no Euro-French or Euro-German, either; we do not expect the documents in these languages to be communicated to the world in a corrupted form, which could evolve into a variant used only within the framework of the Institutions.
This is why we all have to respect the right of the native language speakers of English to grammatical and understandable English texts: the documents they receive in their own mother tongue should be as immaculate as they can be, reflecting the values of the Institutions. To this end, here you can find this guide on the most frequent mistakes that sneak into EU documents. With its help, you can produce a high quality translation and it also may help you understand Euro-English a bit better.
by Zsolt Toth
Terminology Trainee at TermCoord