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Comment by ucaetano | Hacker News Reader

Not just the GDPR, but regulatory bodies.

If you're a German company serving mostly German users, but you have a single user in Portugal, and that single user files a complaint with the Portuguese authorities, bad news, they will investigate you and communicate with you in Portuguese, and you'll have to hire Portuguese-speaking legal counsel to deal with them.

And then you have a single user in Lithuania who decides to file to complaint. And then another one in Romania.

And so on.

You don't even have to have done anything wrong, you might be 100% GDPR-compliant, but that would be enough to possibly drive you out of business.

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No this is completely wrong.

When you're in the EU, the only "GDPR-version" that applies is the german one. I'm currently registered with the bavarian authority for example and any complaints will be handled there.

You can read this in Art. 56 §1 where this is very explicitly defined.

More importantly, all the versions are translated by accredited law translators into all the EU languages. And the translations are additionally verified.

> and you'll have to hire Portuguese-speaking legal counsel to deal with them

This is simply untrue. Why do you repeat it? Why have you posted it?

Afaik, all EU authorities are required to communicate in a language you speak. You wouldn't have to hire Portuguese speaking counsel, they would have to get German translators.

(This rule is great for appealing traffic fines from abroad)

They have pre-written letters in all EU languages now

More anti-EU/GDPR FUD...

I'm eager to hear the alternative.

A single English legislation, with non-authoritative local versions translated by local governments. The actual language used could be a simplified subset of English, easy to understand for the majority of Europeans. People in legal professions dealing with EU regulations would need to obtain language certifications, but it would massively simplify the EU bureaucracy.

Yes, let's make English the sole official language of the EU. That would go down really well. /s

The current system works really well, and puts the burden of having to deal with people speaking other languages on governments rather than individuals. There's no reason to mess with it because of some imaginary issue.

I’m Dutch and I would be completely down for making English the sole official language of the EU. 90% of the reason we haven’t already is the French and their pride. They even want to completely switch back to French as the main EU language when Brexit is fully done.. I mean, come on! As if the the whole two-week circus of moving the entire parliament to Strasbourg and then back to Brussels isn’t enough of a travesty of inefficiency to pay for their pride.

I don't think it would go down very well with Spain, and perhaps Italy, either.

It's not a politically acceptable solution, but it's certainly a solution. And it's not acceptable for purely nationalistic and self serving reasons of the politicians.

There is absolutely no technical reason the EU bureaucracy cannot function in a single language. Now that UK leaves, there's not even the problem of a unfair language advantage except maybe to some degree for Malta. It would massively simplify and reduce the cost of the EU. It will also never happen, precisely for that reason.

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