the next academic on my list… Peter Ives wrote a short summary for a presentation to “Multiple Diversities: European Experiences” held by the Consortium for European Studies.
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(Can’t say I’m too fond of the label, but it’s statistically true. The “scientific objectivity” of quantification must be what makes it acceptable.)
Here’s another site with good-looking offshoot links. I downloaded a couple of pdfs on Support for minority languages in Europe, “commissioned by the Language Policy Unit of the Directorate General for Education and Culture, is now available in its original English version. This study provides a thoroughgoing analysis of the issues surrounding the protection and promotion of regional and minority languages in the EU context.” From the DG on Education and Training.
Then there’s Euromosaic,
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Here is site lists international instruments regarding national minorities. (Most links are dead.) 
for instance, the 1998 The Oslo Recommendations regarding the Linguistic Rights of National Minorities.
The Lund Recommendations on the Effective Participation of National Minorities in Public Life 1999
A list of all treaties entered into by the Council or Europe (a different entity, by the way, than the Council of the European Union).
Specific to EuroParl:
Kuijpers Resolution on the languages and cultures of regional and ethnic minorities in the European Community 30 October 1987
Killilea Resolution on linguistic and cultural minorities in the European Community 9 February 1994
Here’s a more current report “with recommendations to the Commission on European regional and lesser-used languages &emdash; the languages of minorities in the EU &emdash; in the context of enlargement and cultural diversity (2003/2057(INI)) Committee on Culture, Youth, Education, the Media and Sport, Rapporteur: Michl Ebner”.
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Unesco has posted the text with a brief historical account.
the Preamble declares:
“[T]his Declaration takes language communities and not states as its point of departure and is to be viewed in the context of the reinforcement of international institutions capable of guaranteeing sustainable and equitable development for the whole of humanity. For these reasons also it aims to encourage the creation of a political framework for linguistic diversity based upon respect, harmonious coexistence and mutual benefit.”
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This article discusses linguicide as a parallel to genocide, using the example of Kurdish in Turkey. It also challenges the assumption of linguistics as a field of neutrality. The Politics of A-political Linguistics: Linguists and Linguicide
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You need to have access to a university library to get the industry reports and other goodies available in the CQ Researcher, but wow – does it have some awesome stuff. Anyone into transnational flows ought to know about it! Also the Business and Company Resource Center.
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If you ever wondered about rates of obesity in the U.S., Center for Disease Control lays it out in this map of obesity trends from 1985-2004 (download the powerpoint presentation and start at 1985 for maximum effect).
My BMI is normal (19.85).
Bunch of nutritionist recommended info (no Atkins! is available from National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, especially Portion Distortion.
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well, he’s not totally against it, but he’s definitely for curtailing it. His hard-hitting critique says much (blurring the terms translation and intepretation), including a call
“to go beyond the logic inscribed in the discourse of translation. If one is to believe in translation, in the people who support and live from translations, translation is always necessary and that’s the end of the story. But if one begins by looking at interlingual space, the only real question is how we ever came to believe in translation so much. How did we ever get to this ideal “usage de toutes les langues” and the associated theories?
Several reasons:
First, there is a wide gap between the official discourse and what actually happens on the ground. Despite claims to respect multilingualism through translation, the European Commission deploys what is called a “real needs policy”, which basically incorporates use of a lingua franca or the use of passive competences wherever possible, as happened in the French-English conference cited above. This tends to mean that the more specialized the meetings, the less there are interpreters present. The official discourse on translation is thus largely produced for external consumption, to keep the masses and academics happy.
Second, because the official discourse exists, many translations are carried out for purely symbolic purposes.”
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from a google search on language regime European parliament:
a thesis on the EU language regime (addresses both translation and interpretation) Quotes follow from this thesis:
“The Interpreting Directorate of the European Parliament employs approximately 240 permanent staff interpreters and relies on a reserve of more than 1000 auxiliary conference interpreters, of whom between 200 and 500 must be recruited each day to cover its needs. In 2002, the total volume of activity represented 56000 interpreter days for the European Parliament organs alone. Staff interpreters accounted for
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The term “index” was first used by Peirce, who defines it as the connection between a sign and its object, i.e., the sign points to its object. According to Levinson (1983, p. 57), Peirce “argued that they determined a referent by an existential relation between sign and referent (see Burks, 1949),” however they “have not been put to much effective use in linguistic pragmatics”[thanks Tatjana!]. Enter Michael! Who “created a
framework in which this concept could usefully become central
to understanding how language and other communicative codes
are contextualized/contextualizing” (personal correspondence).
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