A Language Barrier
The other day a police chief in the eastern English county of Cambridgeshire had to come clean. Last year his force spent one and half million dollars on interpreters, to help them interview suspects who couldn't speak a word of our language. This tells you a bit about the real England today: an England where there are so many migrant workers from Eastern Europe that in some parts, Slovak is more commonly heard than our mother tongue.
It might be understandable in cosmopolitan London. But Cambridgeshire is not the sort of place you would think of as a honey pot for migrants and crime. Rural Cambridgeshire grows a lot of boring vegetables and spends most of its time asleep - or it used to, until the foreign vegetable pickers began to outnumber the natives and then, realizing how boring vegetable-picking really is, switched to robbery instead. So police hired a big team of interpreters just to be able to talk to them. That money could have paid for 35 extra law enforcers.
The language barrier is also affecting another aspect of English police work. Our officers reckon the German Shepherd is the most effective animal for crowd control, drug searches and armed response operations. A well trained German Shepherd can handle the most difficult assignment. Trouble is there aren't enough home-bred German Shepherds. And - you guessed it - imported dogs don't speak English.
In South Yorkshire the local police have eight Slovak dogs. Now if you tell a Slovak German Shepherd to STAY, it will gaze at you in total puzzlement, scratch itself for a while and then wander off to water the nearest tree. Slovak dogs, like Slovak vegetable-pickers, prefer you to say it in Slovak. But the police couldn't justify any more expense on interpreters so now they're busy learning the languages of their four-legged friends.
Incidentally the Slovak for STAY is "Zustan". Which is fine if all the dogs are Slovak. But they're not. Holland also produces very good German Shepherds. So sitting next to Sven the Slovak may well be Nils the Dutch dog. And if you tell a Dutch dog to "Zustan" you will get an equally quizzical look. The proper word is "Biljf". And, even worse, the police are also importing a breed of Belgian beast called the Malinois. So if you've got Slovak, Dutch and Belgian hounds under your command you will have to shout: "Zustan, Biljf and Reste" just to make them stay precisely where they are.
These days this country can't even say it's going to the dogs with ease.
by Ed Boyle