Kinnock's language plan riles the French

Europe's simmering language tensions have blown up into a diplomatic dispute, with furious complaints from the French government and media that the "language of Molière" is being sidelined in Brussels.

Ministers have lodged protestsagainst plans by Neil Kinnock, the European Commission vice-president, to streamline the translation system used when officials draft formal decisions. At present all documents must be translated into English, French and German, and sometimes into all 11 official languages, at each stage of discussion. Mr Kinnock wants to allow discussion in English, French or German, with translation only of the agreed final texts.

The plans have been met by anger in the French press, particularly by the daily newspaper Libération, which once famously attacked Mr Kinnock for not speaking a word of French. This time the paper has accused the Commission of attempting a "linguistic coup d'état" and of harbouring a dream that "all the citizens of the Union speak English".

France's Foreign Minister, Hubert Vedrine, and his German counterpart, Joschka Fischer, have lodged a complaint with Romano Prodi, the Commission president. They write (each in his own language) thatthe plans "could only favour monolingualism in the EU, which is unacceptable to our two countries".

Libération said55 per cent of formal Commission documents were in "the language of Shakespeare (compared with 40 per cent in 1991), 44 per cent in French and 1 per cent in German". A Commission source said: "Mr Prodi has never disguised his personal preference for English and the French have been complaining about this ever since he arrived."

Translation and interpretation for the EU institutions cost 685m euros (£433m) last year, roughly equivalent to two euros (£1.30) for each European. The European Commission translation service dealt with more than one million pages of documentation, about 675,000 of which were originally in English, as opposed to 400,000 in French.

The Commission's reform plans are designed to streamline the system before the EU expands to incorporate up to 12 new countries. Earlier this month the Commission said it was planning to hire about 400 new interpreters and use more indirect – or "relay" – translation to stop Europe's eastward enlargement turning the EU into a Tower of Babel.

The expansion will result in an additional 2,500 officials being added to the 17,000 working in Brussels, and the Commission says that preparations will cost 20m euros (£13m) next year alone.

The EU is negotiating with 12 countries and all but two, Bulgaria and Romania, have some chance of joining the first wave of entries, expected around 2004. To cope with the expansion, the Commission plans to increase the amount of indirect interpretation, whereby languages are translated first into English or Frenchbefore being translated into the less common languages.

The entry of new countries is also likely to boost use of the Systran system of computer translation of written texts. But the greater the use of electronic and indirect translation, the greater the potential for mistranslation, particularly of colloquial language. Once, the Systran system converted the English phrase "out of sight, out of mind" into German as "invisible idiot".