[988747]

Did you mean 740k EUR per person? I can't find the whole budget right now, but it costs EU parliament over 100 million just to move it back and forth between Brussels and Strasbourg (which is totally pointless and is only done so that France can feel important). They also apparently spend 1 billion per year on translators.

EDIT: I guess I offended some French people, hence the downvotes :)

[nightpool]

Apparently this is correct:

> In [2014], the European Court of Auditors (ECA) carried out a further analysis of the potential savings if all meetings were held in Brussels, following a request from the Parliament. Their estimate of the cost of the monthly move is 113.800.000 euro.

(From an EJTA fact checking website, which labeled a separate 200MM euro number as "mostly false" https://eufactcheck.eu/factcheck/mostly-false-travelling-cir...)

[manholio]

> They also apparently spend 1 billion per year on translators.

Now that the UK is out of the Union, it would be nice for sanity to prevail and most of those translators be made redundant. Except for drafting official multi-language legal documents, the bulk of the proceedings can go on in English, and EMPs that require translation services should request them from their own countries.

It will never happen, but one can surely dream.

[ignaloidas]

EU publishes tons of written material, and basically all of it has to be translated. Costs for translating the proceedings are very likely less than 1% of total costs for translation.

[manholio]

> EU publishes tons of written material, and basically all of it has to be translated.

But only legislative text needs to have translated versions officially recognized as equivalent. The rest can be produced and published in English, and member countries can translate them as required, if necessary. It's a huge expense that exists only to placate French linguistic nationalism.

[mqus]

Well, Imagine your government (the EU is not far off of being one) is now handling everything in spanish, even though your country speaks english and english is your official language. Lets be generous and there are only about 10% of people not speaking spanish. Is it really ok that there are official documents, meeting notes, publications, advertisements,web sites, videos etc in spanish and only the most important ones get translated to your language?

For companies this would completely fine. For a government this is not.

Apart from that, there is right now a huge source of text that is publicly available and already translated into the same X languages, with a huge quality to boost. People have teached ML translators with that text source. Ofc this is just a side effect but these translations have made other translations and communication in the EU a bit more simple just by being such a big reference.

[FridayoLeary]

Sanity is not one of the hallmarks of the monster that is the EU bureaucracy.

[Fiahil]

> EDIT: I guess I offended some French people, hence the downvotes :)

Yes.

But I have to recognise, they could - at least - hand out "free" train tickets to most of the Parliament staff. Not just between Brussels and Strasbourg, but everywhere in the EU.