The Cost of Linguistic Neutrality

Thirty-one years into the Republic, we have grown accustomed to the sight of simultaneous interpreters in the Federal Assembly chamber, their fingers moving across keypads as Esperanto flows into Spanish, English, Scandinavian dialects, and the languages of Oriente Moderno. We have grown accustomed to it the way one grows accustomed to any miracle: by forgetting it is one. Yet this week, as the Federal Translation Centre released its annual report on interpretation volume and accuracy rates, we were reminded that linguistic neutrality—the founding principle that no region's language would dominate—carries a cost that is not merely administrative.

The Centre processed 2.3 million words of federal discourse last fiscal year. Of those, 1.8 million required real-time interpretation. The error rate, by the Centre's own measure, sits at 0.7 percent—a figure that would be negligible in most contexts. But law is not most contexts. When a Federal Court opinion on fisheries quotas is interpreted from Esperanto into four regional working languages, and then into English for diaspora citizens, the margin for misunderstanding is not negligible. It is constitutional.

We do not argue for abandoning Esperanto. The language was chosen precisely because it belonged to none of us, and therefore could belong to all of us. That choice was wise. But we ought to acknowledge what it cost: the Republic does not speak to itself in a single voice. We speak to ourselves through a careful, perpetual act of translation. Some citizens hear the law first in their native tongue; others hear it first in Esperanto and then in translation. The experience of citizenship is not identical across the four regions. It cannot be, so long as the federal language is not anyone's native tongue.

The question before us is not whether to abandon this arrangement. It is whether we understand what we have chosen. Linguistic neutrality purchases unity at the price of a certain distance from our own governance. We are a polity that must always pause to translate itself to itself. That is not a weakness. But neither should we pretend it is costless.