Language skills are being lost in translation Meanwhile, other cost-cutting plans unfold. Junior British diplomatic staff are being replaced overseas by skilled local talent, especially in our European embassies, whose façades look imposing but which in UK-based staffing terms are being hollowed out. Many overseas jobs, where young diplomats learn a language that will serve them well later at senior levels, no longer exist. Can the current language talent pool deliver a high standard in the years and decades to come? It's not easy even to measure the problem: after all the spending on government IT, Foreign Office databases still can't run-off lists of diplomat language speakers and where they are. Hence yesterday's report that only one in 40 of British diplomats now speaks to the highest level the language of the country where they are posted. The figures somewhat underestimate the Foreign Office's language skills - some diplomats who do speak languages cannot face taking exams again to prove it. However, the whole policy needs gripping. It's good to see William Hague reinstating an in-house language-learning capability and otherwise prioritising British diplomatic foreign language technique. Why do language skills matter to diplomats? Because funny things happen in the language of diplomacy, including at the highest levels. Remember the embarrassment of the late President Kaczynski of Poland during his visit here in 2006, when his too-clever interpreter wrongly interpreted as "feckless" the president's description of many Poles who had come to work here? My own favourite example of linguistic mischief came in Sarajevo in late 1996. High Representative Carl Bildt and assorted ambassadors, including myself, were asking the Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovic to accept an annoying Bosnian Serb proposal that meetings of the state presidency alternate between the two entities. Izetbegovic lost his temper and said in Bosnian, "OK, OK, we can rotate meetings every first, second or fifth time!" "Svaki prvi, drugi, peti put!" To protect him, Izetbegovic's interpreter dishonestly translated his outburst as his earlier line opposing any rotation. When we returned to base, there was gloom at our failure to make progress until I (the only one of us who spoke Bosnian) told the group that Izetbegovic had made an important concession. The rotating meetings took place. Conclusion? Diplomats who speak local languages know more, and get better results. But here's another warning from recent history: we suffered the indignity of an idiotic row with India in 2009 when the Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, used crass, matey New Labour language to address the Indian foreign minister, someone notably older and grander than himself. Whoever you are, it's vital to speak the international language of courtesy. Charles Crawford was British Ambassador in Sarajevo, Belgrade and Warsaw. During his career he learnt Serbo-Croat, Afrikaans, Russian and Polish