Interpreters are the link that allows 27 countries to talk to one another, conveying the complexities of EU affairs into 23 official languages and preventing the European Union enterprise descending into Tower-of-Babel-like confusion.

The Commission’s interpretation service alone has a full-time staff of 500, backed by up to 400 freelancers when the pressure gets overwhelming, with demands to translate Estonian into Danish or Greek, or Portuguese into Maltese and Slovene.

See: Reuters UK