EU institutions looking for new types of translators

Any Koldby's you can think of?

The European Parliament, the Commission and the Council are all discreetly looking for a new type of translators: people that can do ‘IKEA-speak’. It seems quite a few Scandinavians but also representatives of other member States have started puzzling the translation teams in all institutions by slipping in IKEA references when reacting to interventions of their colleagues. The inside joke wouldn’t have been spotted, until someone noticed that a representative of Latvia had apparently responded to a rather tough question from a French colleague by calling him a ‘Koldby’. Though translators simply ignored the expression (probably thinking it was idiomatic), the colleague in question happened to be a fervent IKEA shopper and expressed violently his resentment at being dubbed a “Cow’s hide” (“Peau de vache” in French, expression that refers to the b***y nature of an individual).

A Commission spokesperson told the BJ off the record that “We need to avoid this becoming a habit so we’re going to hire a couple of IKEA fans, make them learn the catalogue and its translation by heart, and step in the next time there’s a similar incident. I mean, we don’t mind the odd ‘Billy’ to refer to a shelve but the ‘Koldby’ incident can just not be repeated”.

Update at 16:28: EU sources on the Internet have confirmed that the Ikea-speak infiltration is even worse than initially assessed. It now seems that the Commission has had an ISITF Unit for ages (Ikea Speak Implementation Task Force) and that the actual meaning of Sitcen, the EU intelligence services, is Secret Ikea-speak Translation & Coordination EU Network….