Lingua Brussels

The EU-Parliament is a place where you hear during one working day a lot of diffrent languages. And if you are good, you be able to use 5-8 or more languages. Today I had lunch with the swedish delegation, spoke finnish in the corridor, had a library lesson in german, ordered a coffee in french and read documents in english. And that is, for many, just the start.

The funny thing is, in work, you have certain words you find hard to translate or often even do not do it. Workslang mixes with the languages being used. So the library lesson in german was mixed with computer english (for example "runter scrollen" ). If you are an outsider (or a trainee ;) ) you often so not have a clue.

The documents I read are in english. Today I read about breastfeeding conserning the issue of obesity in Europe. Thank God there is google to provide me with the information I need. My method is simple. Google the word obesity, look the word in wikipedia and scroll down to german and see what it means in german. Great! :)

As an remark, I must say, a 27 country EU is way too big to handle everything in time in all languages. So many documents can be found only in english or french. The germans complain that services in their language are shut down and it is true alltough they still have big role in the Parliament.

So there is no way around of improving your english or french. I on my way..