Gerhard Stickel Ordre des livres

Europe is not «lost in translation». It lives in and by translation and interpretation. The 11th conference of the European Federation of National Institutions for Language (EFNIL) dealt with the importance of these two significant communicative techniques for mutual understanding within multilingual Europe. The articles by official representatives of the different European institutions inform about the facts of day-to-day interpretation and translation in Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg. Experts discuss translation and interpretation under various general aspects including a historical perspective. Reports on the training and activities of interpreters and translators in several European countries follow. A discussion of the demands and suggestions for translation and interpretation in Europe concludes the thematic part of the book.

The European Union has conceived itself as multilingual since its beginning in 1956. EFNIL, the network of the central language institutions of all states of the Union and several other European countries, promotes the enhancement of individual plurilingualism of the people in Europe as an important prerequisite for European multilingualism. The EFNIL conference hosted 2011 by the British Council in London was devoted to the discussion of how individual plurilingualism is being achieved by language education in Europe. In this volume, several general reflections on the main topic are followed by a critical discussion of present language instruction in the United Kingdom and reports on foreign language education in various other countries. Reports on four current projects that aim to describe the present linguistic diversity of Europe follow. A detailed interim report on the results of one of these projects (ELM) concludes the book.