"Machine translation is fine - it'll give you the bulk of what it means". Or so people keep telling me! Personally, I'm a little wary. And here's a lovely example of why I am cautious. This machine translation of an Italian report of a bike race is, um.... interesting.

I start form the perspective of knowing a bit about cycle racing, and being able to take a semi-intelligent guess at how things may have been expressed in the Italian. But even so, it left me confused!

"The flown one has been launch to the 300 meters from the arrival banner."

Yer wot?

Language learning in schools: Is Britain at odds with the rest of the EU?

As a professional translator, I clearly place value on the learning of foreign language skills in schools. They bring obvious practical benefits (the ability to communicate when in a foreign country, to order a beer, to book a hotel room, to say "hello" and "thank you" to overseas business partners), but they also bring educational benefits - there is research that shows that learning a second language stretches and develops parts of the brain which (to borrow a line from the old Heineken advert) other subjects cannot reach.

The EU clearly recognises this, too, and has today announced that they would like to encourage member states to ensure that 80% of pupils in secondary education should be learning two European languages by the year 2020.

Meantime, in Britain (and most especially in England), the number of pupils taking a GCSE exam in languages is plummeting. Even more shockingly, the BBC claims that only 45% of secondary schools in England are in a position to teach two foreign languages to GCSE standard. This is really not good for Britain's long-term future, not good for our schools, and not good for the employability of English youngsters in a job market that is becoming increasingly international.

I may be a linguist, but I also studied maths when I was at school. So I can see that the figures reflect the decline of language learning in England: Across England, Wales and Northern Ireland, there were 216,718 for foreign languages in 2007. In 2008, that figure had dropped to 201,940. Because I had to study a range of subjects at school, I can recognise that this represents a drop of roughly 7% in one single year. And sadly, that merely reflects the trend. Equally sadly, very, very few British schoolchildren could even attempt to read out the number in French (the number of pupils taking French at GCSE has fallen by 30% since it stopped being compulsory for over-14s to learn French in 2004).

So what happened? Well, back in 2002, the British government decided that studying modern languages should no longer be compulsory in secondary schools. I have often wondered why, and in February 2009 BBC News quoted the then-Education Secretary Estelle Morris as saying - well, read her comments yourself. I read it as saying "Truants told us they didn't like going to school because they didn't like having to learn foreign languages." So she did away with the compulsory learning of modern languages. (Interestingly, Ms Morris did not abolish compulsory schooling, which would surely have been the more logical conclusion!).

I despair!