This question concerns itself mainly with British politicians, captains of industry, academics, and anyone else who might be called upon to give an informed opinion to viewers on the European mainland.
It’s notable that such figures from other countries very often give their interviews to British TV stations in English. It’s difficult to put a figure on how many but I’d put the percentage at greater than 50%. Whereas in general one would expect more Europeans to be fluent in English than we are in a foreign language, for reasons not excluding laziness on our part, I’m curious to know whether a significant percentage of British interviewees on European TV stations speak the local language. My own uninformed opinion is that the percentage will be low.
When I attended school sometime during the last century, the five main foreign languages taught were French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Latin. Ignoring Latin as inexpedient to this OP, I guess I am looking primarily at viewers from countries that speak any of the aforementioned four languages.
However, if Foreign Secretary David Miliband has been heard speaking Albanian I’ll be seriously impressed.
Cofirmation bias? Are British viewers not just getting the ones where they speak English, due to producers rightly or wrongly assuming that we can’t cope with subtitles?
When I occasionally watch BBC Int., a lot of interviews (which are not only from Europe, though, but from all over the world) are translated (instead of subtitles, there are running bars at the bottom - rather distracting to me). I haven’t so far counted how many interviews are in English, and how many are translated, but I can try to do so in the future.
I noticed* that a few German politicans answered in English, but most of politicans esp. will talk in their native language instead and have it translated, because they aren’t 100% proficient in speaking English on the spot (they can understand it well, and speak enough to be understood, but words have so many delicate meanings and nuances that they want to get it right. Plus, a politican struggling for words is less optimal than talking suavely in his own language while the translator struggles.)
Since this is BBC Int., it’s mostly news, so the interviews are either the “stick a microphone under his nose for 5 min.s” or “we have invited Mr. X who’s an expert on this topic into our studio in … and are now switching to him, also for 5 min.s” type, not lengthy 1 hr. interviews.
I certainly would expect (though I don’t have cite for it) that the BBC, given it’s long history, it’s state financing (and therefore, it’s mission of quality news) and it’s reputation of having good and qualified reporters, that a lot of their foreign correspondence journalists live in foreign countries for quite some while and therefore learn the local languages to better immerse into the culture and give a more in-depth picture.
It’s what I expect of ARD and ZDF (the main national TV stations in Germany) because the reporters are introduced as living in … for x number of years, and I hear them talking the native language directly when interviewing.
When I worked for the BBC I would occasionally see ads in the “Jobs” section of Ariel, the BBC’s in-house paper, for foreign correspondents based in places all over the world. A knowledge of the language, history and culture of the country in question was an absolute requirement.
Even when foreign correspondents come home their language skills are sometimes called on. One of the presenters for the BBC’s recent Olympics coverage, Carrie Gracie, was chosen because she used to be the BBC’s Beijing correspondent and could therefore, for example, interview Chinese people in Mandarin.
On news items my recollection is that, in the main, Europeans not fluent in English being interviewed on British TV have their comments translated and a voiceover in English is provided.
Like constanze I intend to pay a little more attention to this subject in the future, although I’ll be very interested in other comments from the Europe regarding the main question.
