Slowakisch: Brückensprache zur slawischen Welt?

The paper discusses the significance of diversified multilingualism, for Europeans in general and for translators and interpreters of EU-translation services in particular. Officially, the European Union is multilingual but it has long since been part of “the empire of English” as defined by Snell-Hornby (2006). Translations from the simplified Euro-English into other EU-languages make up for over 60% of the total number of translations, and they generally raise no difficulties, but difficulties may well occur when an EU-commissioner, for example, chooses a proverb in his mother tongue as the slogan for an EU-campaign. How can such translation challenges be approached? Can a translator be expected to have a command of all official EU-languages? A possible solution is offered by the multilingual intercomprehension method EuroCom based on developing good linguistic competence in a bridge language as a means of gaining access to other related languages. For Romance languages, this is French and for Germanic languages it is English. They are are also procedural languages of EU-institutions. With Slavonic languages, the situation is more difficult and the ensuing problems are presented and discussed in the paper.