A random trip anywhere around our major population centres today will almost certainly bring you into contact with a foreign translation of English documents, road signs or notices within buildings. Examples of this can most readily be found within Local Council literature, on council premises and within Schools.

Now of course, everyone recognises that the purpose of this is to aid the large migrant population within the UK at the moment, but even a cursory look at the list of translations will see that this solution is somewhat cumbersome.

Why?

Well, a translated document or sign, will show a confusing mass of several different languages, many of which are also in different scripts. Your eye is perpetually drawn off on a tangent, which unnecessarily complicates any said documenteven for native English speakers reading the English portion of the text. Apart from this there is an administrative burden in multiple translations, in that any multiple translations must, in the first instance, be sent to a competent UK document translations agency and thus, there is an associated cost and time implication.

Is there a solution to this problem? Well in 1887, a Polish Doctor called L. Zamenhof thought so. He created an auxiliary language called Esperanto and envisaged it as a universal second language that could be used worldwide to circumvent the global language barrier.

Esperanto is actually a living language and is promoted worldwide by the Universal Esperanto Association which has centres in 113 different countries. In 1954 the Geneva conference of U.N.E.S.C.O. endorsed the language as an ideal medium for enabling a common understanding and fellowship between speakers of many diverse languages.

The heyday of Esperanto was from the 1950s through to the 1970s and although it has a lower profile now, it is still going strong and there are between half a million to three million Esperantists worldwide still promoting the language.

So is Esperanto useful or even necessary? Certainly, an auxiliary universal second language bridging national barriers is a Utopian panacea for worldwide brotherhood. It makes perfect sense. One could in an instant dispense with having to learn specific foreign languages such as French, Spanish, German or Italianinstead; one could put all necessary effort into Esperanto and be able to converse with anybody people worldwide.

Likewise, whilst in the business environment, when receiving or sending correspondence, if in Esperanto, would not require specialist translation services, thus saving a companys time and money.

So why, if a second universal language is so useful, has Esperanto not been taken up more universally? The answers are complex and varied and encompass such geopolitical factors as the former worldwide reach of the British Empire and the all encompassing current reach of US culture.

Taking up that thread, we can see that a second auxiliary language is actually almost universally in place, proving the usefulness and necessity of such an auxiliary languageit just that circumstance has made English and not Esperanto the second language of choice.