(e.g. Bush; Sarkozy)
From a purely semantic point of view, both are possible in Danish: The person who heads, say, a board of directors can be either president or chairman, although chairman the more common usage. We tend to reserve the term "præsident" for presidents of actual states, which the Union officially is not.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
I had/have the same issue with the Dutch version. I think the translation ("voorzitter") is euphemistic, so I would not like to use it.
In German it is also possible to use the term 'Vorsitzende', but the treaty simply says 'Präsident'.
As I said, a case can be made for using both, and either will be viewed as politicising by one or more camps in the domestic Danish debate. That being said, a 'råd' (counsil) does not, in usual Danish parlance, have a 'præsident' (president) - it has a 'formand' (chairman). A court or a country has a president.
As such, in the title, 'præsident' may be more appropriate for the meaning we want to convey, but in the bulk text - where the context is clearly the European Counsil - chairman is the appropriate word, both relative to the treaty and according to normal Danish conventions. Calling it president would stick out far more than in other languages.
And I'm not sure that we want to have ambiguities in the wording by using two different words for the same post. So in the end I'll have to throw in with chairman.
The use of chairman instead of president is likely to piss off euroskeptics, but many Danish euroskeptics are going to be inclined to sign it anyway if they see it, because Tony Bliar isn't particularly popular with most Danish euroskeptics (and those he is popular with are going to be pissed off with the paragraphs about Vietraq anyway). Pissing off the eurocentrists would be a more dicey proposition, because they don't seem to me to hold Bliar in quite as high disregard.
Now, on the political side of things, of course it's an euphemism, and a transparent one at that, and for the record, I sympathise with your disgust at the use of such transparent propaganda schemes. But that's kinda beside the point here. Not getting Bliar in a big-wig role in the Union leadership is the point, irrespective of my stand on other Union matters. And retiring Bliar - preferably to a sunny beach somewhere near Basra - is a deal more important to me than whatever semantic objections I might have to the text.
Anyway, it's a simple change to make - neither 'formand' nor 'præsident' appear in any other sense in the text, so the final editors can simply do a global search-replace with them if they so please.
Tony Blair har kurs mod EU-præsidentposten
Tony Blair som præsident?
Blair bejler til jobbet som EU-præsident
We tend to reserve the term "præsident" for presidents of actual states, which the Union officially is not.
