This week marked the return to school after the long summer holidays. The end of the holidays also saw the opening of 55 new free schools, according to the Guardian.
One of these is The Hawthorne’s Free School in Bootle; a screenshot of its website home page is shown below.
Spotted anything amiss? That’s right! The greengrocer’s (or superfluous) apostrophe!
What would little Michael Gove say?
Today I posted the article below on the Bristol Wireless blog. It is reproduced here in its entirety.
Yesterday, the last day for responses, Bristol Wireless responded to the Department for Education‘s consultation on internet blocking in the cause of keeping children safe online. The consultation arose from a campaign called ‘Safety Net‘, run by Premier Christian Media and SaferMedia, and supported by the Daily Mail. The campaign, and now the consultation is about requiring Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block adult and other content at network level whilst giving adults a choice to ‘opt-in’ to this content.
However, taking part in the consultation wasn’t easy. Consultees had to do the following:
- Download consultation questionnaire;
- Fill in questionnaire;
- Upload completed questionnaire to Dept. of Education website.
Sounds easy, doesn’t it? It wasn’t.
Here’s why. Ignoring the rhetoric on open standards coming out of their Whitehall neighbours the Cabinet Office, Education Department civil servants only made the consultation questionnaire available as a Microsoft Word file (Wot? No ODF? Ed.). The author of the questionnaire had also stuffed it full of Word macros; this made it very difficult, if not impossible, to open using alternative office suites, such as LibreOffice. Many highly experienced openistas encountered this: Alan Lord (aka the Open Sourcerer) mentioned on Twitter that he couldn’t open it, whilst Glyn Moody could, but found the questionnaire impossible to fill in! On the chief scribe’s, machine attempting to open the file either stalled to a complete halt or crashed the office suite! 🙁 Ultimately, the chief scribe was only able to complete the questionnaire as he had access to a copy of MS Office.
We cannot understand why the civil servants at the Dept. for Education couldn’t have designed the consultation questionnaire as an online survey. Bristol City Council has years of experience of doing online consultations in this manner – and they work very well indeed. Perhaps Sir Humphrey at the Dept. for Education should have called the Counts Louse for advice. As it is, out of 10 we’re giving this Education Dept. consultation a mark of 2. They’d better pull their socks up or it’ll be detention for them… 🙂
Update 08/09/12: It seems that the consultation did originally start out as an online consultation, but was rejigged owing to extremely embarrassing security cock-ups, as The Register reports.
The Register was first to reveal – within hours of the Department for Education publishing its parental internet controls proposal – that the DfE’s website was ironically exposing the email addresses, unencrypted passwords and sensitive answers submitted people who filled in the consultation’s questionnaire.
As a result of this additional information, we’ve now reduced the DfE’s mark to minus 2 out of 10. 🙂
As mentioned on the free/open source software for translation page, both LibreOffice and OpenOffice (the project from which it forked) can have their functionality increased by plug-ins known as extensions.
Of the extensions I’ve tried so far, my favourite has to be MultiSave. MultiSave enables a file to be saved in up to 3 formats at once: ODF, MS Office and PDF.
As I always work in ODF, but usually return work in MS Office format and submit my invoices as PDFs, you can imagine how much time this has saved me.
Give it a try! I recommend it.
For as long as I can remember, the BBC has always prided itself on the quality of its English.
However, I seriously doubt whether it deserves its reputation as a guardian of the English language any more.
My biggest disappointment usually occurs when listening to the news on Radio 4. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve fumed at the use of the phrase “spoken through a translator”. It also annoys my fellow translators (and no doubt our interpreter colleagues too) to an equal extent. Such terminological inaccuracy does not do dear old Auntie any favours.
We linguists earn our crust on the basis of our precise use of terminology and there’s a real distinction between the work done by translators and that done by interpreters. Indeed one might go as far as to assert that they’re different skills, even though the outcome is the same: enabling communication between people who lack the capability to understand what another is communicating in another language.
For the benefit of passing BBC staff, here’s a brief explanation of the difference between interpreting and translation: interpreting deals with the spoken word, translation with the written word.
That’s easy to remember, isn’t it? 🙂
Needless to say, my heart soars and a smile of relief crosses my face when Auntie gets the terminology right and I hear the words: “(insert name of prominent person), speaking through an interpreter, …”.
Furthermore, the geek side of me groans inwardly when the likes of Radio 4’s You and Yours and Woman’s Hour regularly ask listeners to email the programmes involved ‘through the website’, but that’s a matter for another post entirely (as are the manifold sins of Auntie’s TV programme sub-titlers). 🙂