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Tuesday, August 19, 2008

When euro-English goes wrong

The Team behind the whizzy EU-funded website "Cafe Babel" describe themselves as:

"A young, open team who are ripping to crunch into life and play their parts not only as spectators of European life, but actors too."

They also think that:

"With the Lisbon Strategy back on track, a European business industry blooming, a European Central Bank on the front scene, Europe is a true economic giant."

It goes on and on the same vein. They think that:

"Europeans create and discover each other's multicultural skills"

Blimey.

Does anyone else have any examples of meaningless euro-ese?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Just a point of clarification concerning your post that seems to me to be badly informed.

- cafebabel.com is not "eu-funded". You can check the list of our partners on our partners page, and you'll realize that we have many more partners than the only European Union.

- your first quotation is not how cafebabel.com describes itself - this you can find in the about section - but how our webmaster tells about him. Check your information first to avoid confusion.

- your second quotation is an introduction to a online forum on cafebabel.com. Feel free to debate in it and to post your comments there if you feel like debating.

I can understand that you dislike the European Union, but you do not bring anything concrete to the debate by suggesting incorrectly that cafebabel.com is an instrument of the European Union. You're wrong about that.

For more information, please do not hesitate to read cafebabel.com before writing.

Best regards,

Alexandre Heully
co-founder and director of communications.

Open Europe blog team said...

We don't understand, why do you have a problem with being described as "EU funded", when - as you admit in your first point - you are funded by the EU?

We never said that was your only source of cash, though having a look there are several EU bodies and several other EU-funded bodies there.

By the way, how much public funding does CafeBabel receive in total? And why should bodies on one side of the EU-debate recieve public funding, while the other side does not? In a democracy shouldn't both sides be treated equally?

Anonymous said...

ha ha, the sudden silence says it all. so obviously don't like a light being shone into their cosy eu-funded corner.