Plain – and translated - English

This blog tries to write in plain English about important questions – such as “the State” and the continuous efforts made globally in the past few decades to shape it so that it (better) serves the public interest.

Despite the significance of the State in our lives (for both bad and good) it is noticeable that very few journalists bother to cover the operation of public services.. And, when they do, it is either to reproduce government press releases (about good news) - or to cover a scandal which is easily filed under the “bureaucratic blunders” heading.

The best newspapers, of course, still have their “economics”, “education”, “social policy” or “science” “correspondents” for more nuanced coverage – although “affairs of state” are covered by “diplomatic”, "foreign” or “political” “correspondents…

But last year, I was so inspired by a (rare) journalistic book about state reform in the UK that I wrote a series of posts – which morphed into How did admin reform get to be so sexy?

Operating across ten countries as I have in the past 30 years, translation has been an important part of my life - which, however, all too rarely gets a mention anywhere let alone by me. I was, therefore, delighted to find that the fourth of the 63 chapters of The Palgrave Handbook of Public Administration and Management in Europe; ed Edoardo Ongaro and Sandra van Thiel (2018) deals – for almost the first time for native English speakers - with this question of translating public admin terms…. You can read  their “Languages and Public Administration in Europe” here.

Those of us who have pontificated since the 1980s in European networks rarely gave a thought to how our concepts and sentences were dealt with by the valiant translators – very few of whom had any qualifications in public administration.

I know that – whenever simultaneous translation was on offer - I was almost unique in seeking out those who would be doing the translation and spending time with them to explain my presentation….

The very word “politics” was a classic conceptual morass. “accountability” and “responsibility” not far behind….Just today, my partner and I were having an argument about the characteristics of “magistrates” – who have such different roles in the French, Romanian, UK and US traditions….

And it is not just a question of simple terms – it is also the nuances of phraseology as demonstrated by this classic translation guide.

What a pity that we can do no tests on the understanding of European politicians, senior civil servants, journalists and judges have of the concepts with which they deal.....we might indeed be shocked by how their british and american counterparts understand them......