Desperate attempts are being made to round up people who are prepared to leave Malta to spend their days translating tedious EU documents into Maltese. The European Commission has warned the Maltese government that more such people must be found, or else. Of course, the European Commission does not particularly care whether documents are translated into Maltese or not. In agreeing to have Maltese as an official language of the European Union, it merely gave the Maltese government enough rope to hang itself. From here on, there is going to be a mad scramble to train and recruit translators who are prepared to be flexible and mobile. Much effort, time and money will be concentrated on this objective, to the detriment of more useful and productive ends.
The attainment of this particular objective is consuming but ultimately pointless, because it is not productive. Or rather, what it produces is largely meaningless, in the manner of the output of philosophers who engage in talk about the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin. The translators who are so expensive to train, so costly to pay and so hard to recruit will produce nothing but reams of documents in Maltese that nobody will read – or perhaps, just a couple of bloody-minded people who can read English perfectly well, but who wish to make a nationalistic point in not doing so.
I am overly rational in these matters, perhaps, and tend to look them purely from the perspective of cost-efficiency. Others seem not to give two hoots about the money and effort and instead concentrate on the political angle. The way these others see it, all that money and expended effort is worth the while, because to them the ultimate objective is the political achievement of getting those documents translated into Maltese, whatever it takes.
To me, all that money and expended effort are definitely not worth the while, because I assess the value of translating these EU documents into Maltese in the context of a specific objective: Reaching a wider audience. People who can read nothing but Maltese are by definition poorly educated, and they are not going to be interested in reading an EU document. Translating the documents into Maltese is therefore not going to get them to a wider audience.
If I were the managing director, I would not approve this initiative. Too wasteful of resources, and not enough benefit derived. Politicians, on the other hand, wear a different pair of spectacles. They are prepared to hoover up time, money and resources just to be able to score nationalistic points. Like anybody gives a stuffed cabbage about this. Ask even the most hardened champion of national pride whether s/he is prepared to pay more taxes to finance the training of translators, and he’ll soon change his tune.
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I’ve noticed that this is typical of the Maltese way of doing things. We tie ourselves up into tangles over the things that don’t matter, or which don’t lead to greater productivity, and neglect the revenue earners. If we are going to deploy precious resources for anything at all, it should be to earn money for this country, rather than to train and recruit Maltese translators for Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg. How about training some illiterate 16-year-olds instead, so that they don’t fall on social security or live a life of crime? Isn’t that more important and productive? And please don’t tell me that we have the time, money and energy to do both, because we don’t. The country is tearing apart at the seams and here we are, worrying about Maltese translators.
To use two clichés in rapid succession, we don’t keep our eyes on the ball and we fail to see the wood for the trees. Look at the two main political parties, for example. They started out with media machines to help them shore up support and gain more votes. Now those media machines have become virtually the raison d’etre of the political parties, consuming huge amounts of money and time. Resources that the Labour Party and the Nationalist Party could more usefully deploy elsewhere – in policy-building, for example – are being eaten up voraciously by the radio and television operations snarling in their backyard. Both political parties have lost sight of their ultimate objective – which is to form the basis of an efficient government – and are instead turning somersaults to meet the frightening costs of running television and radio.
You will see these distractions from the main line of business in many other areas of public life. The desperate scramble for Maltese translators is just one part of it. The attempt to entrench the ban on abortion into the Constitution is another. The proposal to spend a fortune on building up the old opera house site in Valletta, when a few thousands to repair the pavements of the city cannot be found, is a brutal example.
I always make the same mental comparison when I see this kind of behaviour: It is like being given a couple of hours to clean up before guests arrive, and using those two hours to rearrange the contents of the kitchen cupboards, instead of dusting, vacuuming, and chucking the kids’ toys into the playroom. So you entertain your guests in a messy, untidy room, but safe in the knowledge that, should they wish to peer beneath your kitchen sink, they will find it tidy.
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When a shark was caught by fishermen some 30km out at sea, they hauled it in to port and called the photographers. It was a kind of grown-up version, and on a national scale, of “Arani, ma!”
The story was deemed to be front page news – perhaps no fresh assaults were being made on our Constitution that day – and a picture of the scary shark duly appeared, prompting readers to say “Maaaaa! X’biza’!” I couldn’t see what the point of the exercise was. Everyone knows that there are large sharks 30km out at sea. The scary thing would be if there weren’t any, not that there are, because it would upset the balance of the marine eco-system. Sharks swimming 30km off Malta do not pose a danger to human life because nobody chooses to swim that far out. We are not talking about a great white shark seen mooching in Ghadira Bay.
As the Biological Conservation Research Foundation said in a statement after that prize catch, many species of shark are endangered. They grow and reproduce slowly – a bit like humans, but we are not an endangered species – and if the number of sharks caught is greater than the shark population can cope with, there’s trouble.
So remember: a shark is only dangerous if it’s swimming up behind you. If it’s 30km out at sea, it poses about as much danger to you as the man-eating lions in Kenya, as you sit on the sand down at Ghajn Tuffieha.
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Most people don’t read past the headlines and the first paragraph of any story they are interested in, which is why medical scare reports are so effective – and so misleading. Recent news reports, for example, made much of the Maltese stroke death statistics, but closer reading reveals that, of the 395 stroke deaths reported for a given period, 254 were of people aged between 70 and 95. Only 13 were of people less than 50 years old. That’s pretty good for a population of near on 400,000.
Yet the reports were made in tones that would have us believe that strokes are felling the Maltese in panic-inducing numbers. Gone are the days when somebody in his 80s died and we’d just shrug and tell ourselves, “old age.” Now it’s a stroke-related death, and a statistic to cause concern. I think we need reminding that there’s always a cause of death, even when you’re old: Heart failure, cancer, stroke – something always gets written on the death certificate, and it’s not ‘he had a good innings, and his time was up’. Then what gets written on the death certificate becomes a statistic, and everyone else begins to fret: “Oh look how many people are dying of cancer. Oh look, how many strokes! How many heart attacks!”
The thing is that we’re not going to live forever, no matter how much we perfect our diet or how many hours we spend in the gym. We might live a little longer than we would have otherwise, but even this is not necessarily the case. The deaths that shocked many of my contemporaries over recent years were of super-trim men in their 40s who watched what they ate and took plenty of exercise. I’ve also noticed that many who take no exercise at all and who don’t particularly care what they eat (though they don’t over-eat) live well into their 80s and 90s.
But maybe it’s because those were the toughest ones, the fittest who survived a childhood without antibiotics or disinfectants, when so many babies and children died. The babies of the 1950s onwards have endured little or no genetic weeding-out process. Medicine and hygiene have protected us in childhood from the cruelty of the survival of the fittest. The ones who might have died before reaching the age of five, had they been born a few decades earlier, have instead lived only to succumb, perhaps, well before old age.
So what’s the moral of my story? It’s this: It’s not worth depriving yourself of food and drink you love, or punishing yourself on the treadmill, to try and live longer. You may die at 50 in any case, no matter how many lettuces you eat or how many bar-bells you lift. So you might as well have a good time … within moderation, and without challenging fate by smoking cigarettes and downing a bottle of wine every day. There is no secret of eternal life, and there is no secret of eternal youth.