(https://www.ft.com/content/1827fca9-256b-4095-a9d9-aabff05b471e)
Published 27 January 2025, the Financial Times piece argues that in the EU’s labyrinthine institutional machinery, there exists a kind of unofficial “25th language” — the language of acronyms. With 24 official languages already recognised in the European Union, the article argues that ministers, officials and translators often grapple not just with multilingual translation and interpretation, but with a dense layer of abbreviations (DG EAC, EEAS, JHA, EMFAF, ERDF, CERV… etc). This acronym-heavy discourse creates an additional barrier to understanding and participation, even for fluent speakers of the official languages. (Financial Times)
Although this piece is framed somewhat wittily, it touches deeply on issues of accessibility, multilingualism and institutional inclusion in Europe. A few reflections:
- The metaphor of an “acronym language” underscores that multilingualism is more than just translating from English to French to German etc. It’s also about navigating institutional culture — if you don’t understand the shorthand, you may be excluded from policy discussions regardless of your language competence.
- From a translation/localisation perspective, this highlights a non-linguistic yet linguistic-adjacent dimension: ensuring that translation is not only of words but of codes, abbreviations, acronyms and institutional jargon. That means translators and localisers need awareness of the “institutional dialect” of the EU as well as language pairs.
- In terms of language policy, the article flags a subtle but important barrier to genuine multilingualism: even if you provide translations in many languages, the structural complexity of the institution (e.g., acronym-rich texts) remains a bottleneck for participation. So policy should not only look at “how many languages” but “how accessible in each language”.
- For professionals and educators working in multilingual EU contexts, this signals that language training must include “institutional literacy” — teaching not only the language, but also the institutional conventions, abbreviations and culture in which the language is used.
- More broadly, for identity and power: the “acronym language” could be seen as a form of elite code, accessible mainly to those inside the EU machinery. This raises questions about democratic multilingualism: if citizens speak an official language but still cannot follow the discourse because of institutional jargon, then linguistic equality is partial.
- Have you ever experienced difficulty not because the language of a document was foreign to you, but because it was filled with acronyms/jargon you didn’t know? How did that impact your participation or understanding?
- Do you think translation/localisation in multilingual institutions should explicitly address acronym-jargon decoding (e.g., glossary of abbreviations)? Why or why not?
- From a language-training perspective: if you were designing a course for students working in EU institutions or localization of EU content, would you include “institutional acronym literacy” as a module? What might it look like?
Looking forward to your reflections — especially if you’ve worked in multilingual institutional settings!