Section 47

"Babelling on" from Pictopen into English

If someone had before him the text written in pictography, and were going to translate it into his own language, let us say English, not having seen before the original text, the English version resulting of the translation would read more or less as follows.

1. The governments of Europe can reduce the costs of using regional languages by compelling the national governments to pay the costs.
2. In 2005 the European Union spent 1.1 billion euros (1.4 billion dollars) in translations and interpretation.
3. This money was paid for interpretation in 11,000 meetings in one year and for translating more than 1.3 million pages of text.
4. One result (or consequence) of the last increase (in numbers) of the union was that the government of Europe has ordered their functionaries (officials) to write texts less long, which will need less time for translation.
   
5. But not all (plural) difficulties can be easily defeated.
6. A plan in 2002 to simplify the European patents failed because some countries blocked it because the new patents were written only in English, French and German languages.
7. Other attempts to obtain a compromise failed because the high costs.
   

You may compare this text with the original in Section 44. Notice that the words could be different from the original English text but the meaning is the same. Therefore, the translation can be qualified as faithful. It is necessary to remember that pictography does not record words but ideas, meanings.

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