Vers des "langues européennes"

How to translate fish names from French into Hungarian? It is obviously not to easy to manage the great variety of countries the European Union consist of, and this is particularly true from the point of view of linguistic diversity. English as the number one international language can only partially solve this problem. Translating gets especially difficult in the case of domains unequally represented in different languages and civilizations. Fish names are such a domain as far as translating from French (and many other European languages) to Hungarian is concerned: Hungary has no sea, many species that are widely eaten in seaside countries are practically unknown to most Hungarians and the Hungarian language has a tendency to use general terms for different (but usually related) fishes. In this paper the possibility of translating the recipe of French Bouillabaisse into Hungarian comparing French-Hungarian dictionaries with the official European terminology of fishing will be examined.