It's late here in Strasbourg, i am at the Plenary sitting of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, waiting for the tabling desk officer to tell my secretary that the document she sent is ok as far as the content is concerned, so that she (my secretary) can send it over again in a different format, in order for a third person to check if it is properly put into form, so that translators can do their work...

you would think it is translate the document... well, no, it is just cutting and pasting from another document, that was previously sent by my secretary to the tabling desk (bla bla bla)...

That's how this matrix has decided to take the enourmous satisfaction out of my body after that earlier this evening, a legislative proposal i have been working on for the last 15 months has finally been approved at unanimity by the parliamentarians, by a very simple, almost mechanical hand raising.

I am lost. lost in non-translation, lost in  copy-and-paste European Union 'to serve our citizens and be closer to them'  or is it just to make us feel closer to them?
 
But the point of all this is that we need to rush, we need to work on week-ends, work till midnight after a five-hours trip on belgo-luxo-french highroads because what we decide today is the future of half a billion citizens...  you wish!!!

We have to do it because otherwise, only god knows when this bloody text will be translated if we need to take into account Romanian, Bulgarian... and Gaelic!!!  these are the three new official languages of the Eu as from 00.01 on the 1st January 2007.

But there is a funny side to this already too long story : headhunters from the EU went to Ireland to find English-Gaelic translators...  Five people showed up at the interviews, only one of them has actually confirmed Gaelic was his mothertongue, adding 'en passant' that he wonders why we bother translate these into Gaelic since nobody actually need this, everybody would still read laws in english since most of the time Gaelic does not have technical words...

As Manny Ribera said to good old Antonio Montana in Scarface : 'Could be worse, man, could be worse'.... if you put the cuban accent when you read this last bit, it can really be funny after all...