By: Sara Kovač / Nova24tv
MEP Tanja Fajon is sinking deeper and deeper amid the affair involving her and her accredited assistant, Jure Tanko, who edited the draft report of the Democracy, Rule of Law and Fundamental Rights Monitoring Group, despite the fact that Fajon was not even a member of the group. Namely, journalist Bojan Požar wrote on his Twitter profile that he had received a letter from a translator from Brussels, who wrote: “English texts were never proofread by a Slovenian who works for an MEP.” It is becoming increasingly clear that this affair is very serious.
The translator, who worked in the Council of the European Union in Brussels for a year and a half, said that the largest number of employees in the EU institutions are translators and proofreaders. “It was virtually impossible to send sensitive reports or other texts around to the unauthorised people for proofreading,” she wrote. It is therefore impossible that, as Tanja Fajon put it, her assistant would have had to proofread the report of the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE).
“This is absolute nonsense, to send an English text to a Slovenian – no way,” she also wrote, adding that she does not understand how Jure Tanko was able to get the computer version of the text and even interfere with it.
You can read the letter, written by the translator who used to work in Brussels, in its entirety below:
“Hi, I was just reading the articles about the proofreading of the text of the European Parliament’s mission to Slovenia.
I worked as a translator in Brussels for a year and a half in the Council of the European Union. English texts were never proofread by a Slovenian who works for an MEP.
Namely, the largest number of employees in the EU institutions are translators and proofreaders. It is virtually impossible for them to just be able to send sensitive reports or other texts around to the unauthorised people for proofreading. This is absolute nonsense, to send an English text to a Slovenian – no way. Every language group jealously guards its field, and the leaders of the English departments have always been Englishmen.
We only translated the texts written by the Council, with the exception of a few texts by the European Commission here and there, when parts of certain texts were being included in the legislature of the Council. But for any one of us to just send these texts around, that never happened. Because there is even certain competition among the institutions themselves.
I do not understand how it is possible that this assistant was able to get the computer version of the text and even interfere with it. If this is how things currently stand in the European Parliament, then things have gotten pretty relaxed recently.”