Diplomats and officials revealed early this week that the Arab members of World Trade Organization are making efforts to get Arabic recognized as the organization’s fourth official language. Keith Rockwell, the spokesman for WTO said that Kuwait had made a formal request and members of the body were discussing the matter. The WTO has 153 members at present among which there are around a dozen Arab countries, six more including Iraq, Libya and Algeria are in the process of joining. But all said and done there are significant hurdles that might thwart this effort.
WTO’s existing official languages include English, French and Spanish. Adding a new official language means that there will be requirement for interpretation, translation and printing. This would involve heavy expenditure. But that is not all, adding Arabic as an official language would lead other nations like China and Russia to step up efforts for including their languages among the official languages of WTO. Moscow has already been making on-and-off efforts in that direction for some years now and the addition of Arabic may just renew its zeal and increase pressure on WTO. According to official sources, the addition of 3 languages would lead to an annual cost of around $43 million or 45 million Swiss Francs. Consider this amount by comparing it with the total budget of WTO for 2009 – 189 million Swiss Francs.
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