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I'm worried about influencing outcomes in the EU due to language barriers, especially on boring and "unsexy" issues like Internet regulation. It'd be important

I'm worried about influencing outcomes in the EU due to language barriers, especially on boring and "unsexy" issues like Internet regulation. It'd be important for the EU to be able to vote for representatives regardless of your primary jurisdiction. Even if I manage to convince most of the representatives from my region, they will be outvoted by the French who had a big hand in passing the proposal forward the last time... It's like they reside in a completely different universe, with no hope of meaningful communication. Edit: adding a link to this false-positive emulator script[0] as an example of how stupid the proposal is. [0]: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1015594170424193024 https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1015594170424193024

aloisdg 8y ago
This is why we need Esperanto.
- azangru 8y ago
  Or English as the officially recognised global language ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  - austincheney 8y ago
    Why not Mandarin?
    - eps 8y ago
      Because English is one of the simplest languages to learn. A better question is why not Spanish?
      - StavrosK 8y ago
        Please stop with this fiction. I bet you never had to learn English as a second language. It's very hard.
        tql 8y ago
        Mandarin and Spanish are harder.
        StavrosK 8y ago
        For whom?
        timrichard 8y ago
        I wouldn't underestimate the difficulty of picking up a highly tonal language like Mandarin, if only exposed to the 44 phonemes of English well into adulthood...
        gambiting 8y ago
        English is a second language for me and compared to many other languages it's comparatively very simple, or at least you can start to understand and speak it at very basic level incredibly quickly. The biggest issue with English is completely inconsistent and illogical pronunciation, you can have two words that have the same spelling but different meaning depending on how they are pronounced - read and read for example. But the grammar is almost laughably simple and the lack of any sort of variation when it comes to gendered adjectives and verbs puts it firmly in the category of easy languages to learn.
        StavrosK 8y ago
        > But the grammar is almost laughably simple and the lack of any sort of variation when it comes to gendered adjectives and verbs puts it firmly in the category of easy languages to learn. This just sounds like cherry-picking. You're completely glossing over the issue of spelling being insane and concluding that the language is easy because there are no gendered adjectives and many tenses, even though the existing tenses are largely completely irregular.
        Jommi 8y ago
        Yet it's the language with - the most available teaching services - the most available free teaching resources - highest percent of use-cases in the world - easiest methods of finding a training companion anywhere in the world It's just so far ahead in these structural things that supporting any other language does not seem to make any sense anymore at this point.
    - azangru 8y ago
      - Because Mandarin is the official language only of China (and Taiwan)? - Because English already has a great momentum (with the number of speakers of English as a second language, pop culture and the Internet)?
  - jaabe 8y ago
    With Britain leaving the EU there is sadly a lot less reason for English to be the official language.
    - dbdjfjrjvebd 8y ago
      Surely the case for English as a working language is now stronger. Previously it could have been seen as unfair to use one member state's language over another...
      - grozzle 8y ago
        Ireland is still in.
        deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
        icebraining 8y ago
        Also Malta. But neither really have a hope of overshadowing the big ones, even with their language as official.
    - kalleboo 8y ago
      Or, on the contrary, there is less reason against it (no more perceived advantage or "cultural capitulation" to the Brits)
    - flexie 8y ago
      Now if Britain is leaving, English could be considered as a neutral language so no country has an advantage. It is also still the only language that is taught as a foreign language in close to all primary and secondary schools in the Union. It's the most spoken language in the Union. It's relatively easy to learn as a foreign language. It's also the de facto language of international trade, of science, of culture and of international diplomacy (sorry France).
      - Xylakant 8y ago
- kace91 8y ago
  We already have a common language that's widely known across Europe (English), it just doesn't have the reach that the native language does. Some countries are also really self centered in terms of news, etc. Here in Spain, for example, most national news deal mostly with corruption scandals, political issues in Catalonia, sports, and little else. Geopolitical and/or European issues are given surprisingly little time considering we're the fifth largest economy in the union (about to be the fourth after/if the UK leaves).
  - als0 8y ago
    Feels like the same in the UK media, except s/Catalonia/Brexit/g.
    - petre 8y ago
      It's quite different. The UK hasn't sent police to stop the Scottish referendum and beat up voters and the EU has not sought the extradition of Nigel Farage.
      - scalesolved 8y ago
        I believe the poster was meaning that the UK press is insular and doesn't report on wider European issues like the Spanish press and not commenting on Catalonia or making a comparison with Scotland.
erk__ 8y ago
This is the reason that all proposals to the EU are translated to the native language of every nation. As of writing this the documents are available in 24 languages.
josteink 8y ago
> Edit: adding a link to this false-positive emulator script[0] as an example of how stupid the proposal is. TLDR: In an optimistic estimate, to stop 300 illegitimate copyright infringing posting, we would have to block 150.000 non-infringing posts. Whoever suggests this as a policy, must have received serious payoffs to close their eyes for the overwhelmingly negative effects this law will have.
entity345 8y ago
Language barriers are overplayed. If they were so important then EU institutions would simply not work... Now, I don't know where the majority stands on this issue but being outvoted by the majority is called democracy. The French, even assuming French representatives in the EU are all on the same side, cannot force EU legislation. Any legislation has majority support (including at member states' governments level).
toyg 8y ago
I find that unlikely to believe. Yes, the de-facto working languages in Bruxelles are English and French, but chances are everyone knows both (or even English better). If you send material to MEPs of any country, they will be able to read it if they want - there are dedicated translation services, as you might imagine in an org working with dozens of different ethnicities. Language acts simply as a constituency signal (“not in my language? Not a voter of mine...”). That is expected and even legitimate - why should a MEP listen to other voices over the ones of people they actually represent? If you really want to influence a MEP, you would get better chances by finding allies in his constituency. This is not really different than with national parliaments. In terms of this or that national block outvoting a position, it is less frequent than one would expect, and depends largely on how European parties organise. Most parties have some sort of nominated board that agrees a line for the entire group, regardless of national boundaries. Some countries might have a larger influence on the group because of their electoral dynamics (German MEPs for the Greens, for example, will outnumber Italian ones to ridiculous degrees; and some parties are single-country, typically the isolationist ones), but that’s usually not the case in major parties (PSE and PPE).
- haywirez 8y ago
  Correct - this proposal is coming from the EPP, the largest party in the EU parliament. Predictably, most of their MEPs will just blindly vote for it along party lines. Language barriers are crucial in terms of their constituency universe (plus the older demographic skew). Their voters don't read Reddit, Twitter or anything in English and this issue is nowhere near their radars.
  - toyg 8y ago
    > Their voters don't read Reddit, Twitter or anything in English That's a bit patronizing, and a view of internet users that belongs to the '90s. These voters might (for example) like memes and forums very much, but not value them enough to shift political alliances over a proposal like this. Not everyone lives 10 hours a day on the internet.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
> adding a link to this false-positive emulator script[0] as an example of how stupid the proposal is. This is a very interesting twitter thread. The script, and the posted screenshots, repeatedly demonstrate the solution to a single very simple math problem for particular values of input variables. It seems that Alec Muffett is relying on the idea that he wrote a script -- a script which was easy to write and solves a very easy problem -- to provide more credibility than the laws of probability have in their own right, which is -- to me -- 100% backwards. If your script disagrees with the math, particularly at this level, the odds are overwhelming that your script has a bug, not that the math was wrong.

aloisdg 8y ago

This is why we need Esperanto.

azangru 8y ago
Or English as the officially recognised global language ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- austincheney 8y ago
  Why not Mandarin?
  - eps 8y ago
    Because English is one of the simplest languages to learn. A better question is why not Spanish?
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      Please stop with this fiction. I bet you never had to learn English as a second language. It's very hard.
      - tql 8y ago
        Mandarin and Spanish are harder.
        StavrosK 8y ago
        For whom?
        timrichard 8y ago
        I wouldn't underestimate the difficulty of picking up a highly tonal language like Mandarin, if only exposed to the 44 phonemes of English well into adulthood...
      - gambiting 8y ago
        English is a second language for me and compared to many other languages it's comparatively very simple, or at least you can start to understand and speak it at very basic level incredibly quickly. The biggest issue with English is completely inconsistent and illogical pronunciation, you can have two words that have the same spelling but different meaning depending on how they are pronounced - read and read for example. But the grammar is almost laughably simple and the lack of any sort of variation when it comes to gendered adjectives and verbs puts it firmly in the category of easy languages to learn.
        StavrosK 8y ago
        > But the grammar is almost laughably simple and the lack of any sort of variation when it comes to gendered adjectives and verbs puts it firmly in the category of easy languages to learn. This just sounds like cherry-picking. You're completely glossing over the issue of spelling being insane and concluding that the language is easy because there are no gendered adjectives and many tenses, even though the existing tenses are largely completely irregular.
        Jommi 8y ago
        Yet it's the language with - the most available teaching services - the most available free teaching resources - highest percent of use-cases in the world - easiest methods of finding a training companion anywhere in the world It's just so far ahead in these structural things that supporting any other language does not seem to make any sense anymore at this point.
  - azangru 8y ago
    - Because Mandarin is the official language only of China (and Taiwan)? - Because English already has a great momentum (with the number of speakers of English as a second language, pop culture and the Internet)?
- jaabe 8y ago
  With Britain leaving the EU there is sadly a lot less reason for English to be the official language.
  - dbdjfjrjvebd 8y ago
    Surely the case for English as a working language is now stronger. Previously it could have been seen as unfair to use one member state's language over another...
    - grozzle 8y ago
      Ireland is still in.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - icebraining 8y ago
        Also Malta. But neither really have a hope of overshadowing the big ones, even with their language as official.
  - kalleboo 8y ago
    Or, on the contrary, there is less reason against it (no more perceived advantage or "cultural capitulation" to the Brits)
  - flexie 8y ago
    Now if Britain is leaving, English could be considered as a neutral language so no country has an advantage. It is also still the only language that is taught as a foreign language in close to all primary and secondary schools in the Union. It's the most spoken language in the Union. It's relatively easy to learn as a foreign language. It's also the de facto language of international trade, of science, of culture and of international diplomacy (sorry France).
    - Xylakant 8y ago
kace91 8y ago
We already have a common language that's widely known across Europe (English), it just doesn't have the reach that the native language does. Some countries are also really self centered in terms of news, etc. Here in Spain, for example, most national news deal mostly with corruption scandals, political issues in Catalonia, sports, and little else. Geopolitical and/or European issues are given surprisingly little time considering we're the fifth largest economy in the union (about to be the fourth after/if the UK leaves).
- als0 8y ago
  Feels like the same in the UK media, except s/Catalonia/Brexit/g.
  - petre 8y ago
    It's quite different. The UK hasn't sent police to stop the Scottish referendum and beat up voters and the EU has not sought the extradition of Nigel Farage.
    - scalesolved 8y ago
      I believe the poster was meaning that the UK press is insular and doesn't report on wider European issues like the Spanish press and not commenting on Catalonia or making a comparison with Scotland.

erk__ 8y ago

This is the reason that all proposals to the EU are translated to the native language of every nation. As of writing this the documents are available in 24 languages.

josteink 8y ago

> Edit: adding a link to this false-positive emulator script[0] as an example of how stupid the proposal is. TLDR: In an optimistic estimate, to stop 300 illegitimate copyright infringing posting, we would have to block 150.000 non-infringing posts. Whoever suggests this as a policy, must have received serious payoffs to close their eyes for the overwhelmingly negative effects this law will have.

entity345 8y ago

Language barriers are overplayed. If they were so important then EU institutions would simply not work... Now, I don't know where the majority stands on this issue but being outvoted by the majority is called democracy. The French, even assuming French representatives in the EU are all on the same side, cannot force EU legislation. Any legislation has majority support (including at member states' governments level).

toyg 8y ago

I find that unlikely to believe. Yes, the de-facto working languages in Bruxelles are English and French, but chances are everyone knows both (or even English better). If you send material to MEPs of any country, they will be able to read it if they want - there are dedicated translation services, as you might imagine in an org working with dozens of different ethnicities. Language acts simply as a constituency signal (“not in my language? Not a voter of mine...”). That is expected and even legitimate - why should a MEP listen to other voices over the ones of people they actually represent? If you really want to influence a MEP, you would get better chances by finding allies in his constituency. This is not really different than with national parliaments. In terms of this or that national block outvoting a position, it is less frequent than one would expect, and depends largely on how European parties organise. Most parties have some sort of nominated board that agrees a line for the entire group, regardless of national boundaries. Some countries might have a larger influence on the group because of their electoral dynamics (German MEPs for the Greens, for example, will outnumber Italian ones to ridiculous degrees; and some parties are single-country, typically the isolationist ones), but that’s usually not the case in major parties (PSE and PPE).

haywirez 8y ago
Correct - this proposal is coming from the EPP, the largest party in the EU parliament. Predictably, most of their MEPs will just blindly vote for it along party lines. Language barriers are crucial in terms of their constituency universe (plus the older demographic skew). Their voters don't read Reddit, Twitter or anything in English and this issue is nowhere near their radars.
- toyg 8y ago
  > Their voters don't read Reddit, Twitter or anything in English That's a bit patronizing, and a view of internet users that belongs to the '90s. These voters might (for example) like memes and forums very much, but not value them enough to shift political alliances over a proposal like this. Not everyone lives 10 hours a day on the internet.

thaumasiotes 8y ago

> adding a link to this false-positive emulator script[0] as an example of how stupid the proposal is. This is a very interesting twitter thread. The script, and the posted screenshots, repeatedly demonstrate the solution to a single very simple math problem for particular values of input variables. It seems that Alec Muffett is relying on the idea that he wrote a script -- a script which was easy to write and solves a very easy problem -- to provide more credibility than the laws of probability have in their own right, which is -- to me -- 100% backwards. If your script disagrees with the math, particularly at this level, the odds are overwhelming that your script has a bug, not that the math was wrong.