The European Union is running out of English-speaking interpreters, and also wants to find more experts in Arabic, Chinese and Russian, EU officials said Thursday, dpa reported.
"Everyone says that English is everywhere, but we're having real problems finding English-language professionals," Brian Fox, the head of the European Commission's interpretation service, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
At the same time, the EU executive is increasingly interested in having its own Chinese-, Arabic- and Russian-language interpreters, commission languages spokesman Pietro Petrucci told dpa.
According to the latest commission survey, close to 90 per cent of attendees at EU meetings use only English-language interpretation.
Yet fewer and fewer native English speakers are learning other languages, making it increasingly difficult for the EU's central bodies to find interpreters and translators.
English speakers "don't feel the need to speak anything else: Why bother?" Fox said.
On Thursday, the commission launched a campaign to encourage young native English speakers to learn languages and to consider working as translators or interpreters. The EU institutions are going to need some 300 more English translators by 2015, Fox said.
The EU institutions are also struggling to find experts in other languages, particularly German.
"We are having real problems in securing interpreters who know German - not interpreters working into German, but interpreters in the other languages who understand German ... Today's youngsters find German to be difficult (and) off-putting," Fox said.
And the EU's organs are finding that they need more and more interpretation and translation into and out of Arabic, Chinese and Russian, with a "growing requirement" for those languages, he said.
At present, such work is carried out by freelance translators.
The EU is home to large communities of native speakers of Arabic, Chinese and Russian, which should make it easier to find skilled linguists, Petrucci said.