What botched White Paper translations say about Brexit priorities

The Government has been widely ridiculed for its botched translations of Theresa May’s Brexit White Paper on a future trade relationship with the EU.

The executive summary of the so-called “Chequers’ plan” has been hastily translated into 22 European language, while the full 100-page document was originally published only in English and Welsh, despite the latter not being an official EU language.

The move to provide translations of Theresa May’s Brexit plan “is being seen in Brussels as an attempt to bypass the European Commission and negotiate directly with member states” reports The Independent.

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But the approach appears to have backfired after claims that the German translation was “unreadable” and written in strange “archaic” language featuring made-up compound words.

Other basic errors include the misspelling of Estonia and Finland in the Estonian and Finnish versions, and unusual French inflections which presented Brexit as a moral good.

“Basic errors and amateurish negligence has not only wasted an opportunity to win hearts and minds on the Continent but will confirm Brussels’ worst suspicions about the Government” says The Daily Telegraph.

“It exposes, once again, how poorly the Department for Exiting the European Union understands Brussels, its priorities and its culture,” the paper added.

The EU spends a huge amount of money translating every official document into its 24 official languages - an expenditure that is often highlighted by Eurosceptics as indicative of the waste and bureaucracy that besets the EU.

Yet the dodgy translation could have a more prosaic explanation. The lack of foreign language skills in Whitehall “has been a perennial issue for the civil service”, says the Independent.

An inquiry by the House of Commons foreign affairs committee warned that only 38% of “speaker slots” at the Foreign Office were filled by someone who could speak the language to the specified level.

The former British ambassador to Moscow, Sir Tony Brenton, said Britain had been left in the dark during the 2015 Ukraine crisis because the Foreign Office lacked enough Russian speakers to comprehend information about the situation.