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