An interesting fact emerged today in an article in Inside Time (masthead: the National Newspaper for Prisoners. Ed.) about the mess that Capita Translation & Interpreting’s making of the interpreting contract it has with the Ministry of Justice (posts passim).
The final paragraph of the Inside Time article mentions last year’s Civil Service People Survey, according to which just 28% of MoJ staff had confidence in their senior management and only 32% said the department was well managed. Moreover, a mere 18% of staff felt changes to services were for the better and only 23% said that change was well managed.
What was even more surprising to me – and I hope to any other reasonable person – was the response of the MoJ’s spokesperson to these damning verdicts of the Ministry, as follows:
These results show that staff are growing in confidence in the leadership and management of change in the department.
What are they putting in the senior management’s and ministers’ tea at 102 Petty France, London SW1? I think we should be told.
Earlier this week The Law Society Gazette reported that the court interpreting service provided by Capita Translating & Interpreting (formerly ALS) is getting worse, contrary to the emollient assurances given to MPs by the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Minister for Victims and the Courts, Helen Grant MP, that the service is has improved and is continuing to improve.
Capita Translating & Interpreting has failed to reach its performance target after a year, resulting in delays in thousands of court cases.
Figures released by the Ministry of Justice show that the performance actually fell in January 2013 the rate of complaints about the service has increased since August 2013.
For the first year of the contract, i.e. up to 31st January 2013, Capita Translating & Interpreting’s overall success rate was 90%, compared with a target of 98% in the contract.
During the year under review, Capita Translating & Interpreting received 131,153 requests for language services; these involved 259 different languages. Eleven per cent of these requests “were cancelled by the requesting customer”, i.e. either HM Courts & Tribunal Service or the National Offender Management Service. Of the remaining 116,330 requests, 104,932 were fulfilled or the requesting customer failed to attend, equivalent to a success rate of 90%.
In its statistical bulletin, the MoJ said that “presenting a single success rate does not provide the whole picture on the changes in the operation of the contract over the first 12 months” (that sounds like an excuse to me. Ed.). In addition, the MoJ is claiming that the fall in performance coincided with the contractor reducing the mileage rate paid to interpreters and Helen Grant MP is sticking to her guns with the improbable claim that the contract with Capita Translating & Interpreting is saving taxpayers £15 mn. per annum.
Capita T&I’s performance for the year to 31.0.1.13. Source: Ministry of Justice
Yesterday’s Bristol Post carried a report on the start of building works at Wapping Wharf down by the city docks.
On the whole the report is fairly bland and it looks like a standard bit of blurb produced from a property developer’s press release.
Nevertheless, one sentence in particular drew my attention. It reads:
In recent days large machinery has moved to the site to prepare for the start of remediation and ground works.
After reading that, I began wondering how many of the Post’s readers know what remediation works actually are or what they involve.
Turning to the dictionary, remediation is defined as “the act or process of correcting a fault or deficiency.”
Correcting a fault or deficiency sounds fairly harmless and definitely a good thing to do, doesn’t it?
However, one has to add the word ‘site’ or ‘environmental’ to remediation to get at its actual meaning as used in the Post’s report, which is cleaning up pollution or contaminated land.
There are various means of effecting remediation, depending on the contamination or pollutant involved, but one very common means (and one which has been used extensively in the past by developers in Bristol. Ed.) is the use of heavy plant to dig up the contaminated soil, load it into lorries and cart it off to a toxic waste dump.
The entrance to the Wapping Wharf site in Wapping Road. Picture courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Finally, a small piece of advice: if you know of any remediation works taking place, for the sake of you health do try not to be downwind of them, especially in dry and/or windy weather.
Canada’s La Presse reports that Linguee has just launched new language pairs – German-English, Spanish-French and Portuguese-French – for its online dictionary.
Since its creation Linguee has recorded more than a million search requests from around the world. For the Linguee team the application can be very useful within a professional, academic or private context to understand the contents of an email or a text in a foreign language, as well as current expressions, technical terms or the usual wording of greetings or salutations.
According to Linguee’s founder and CEO Gereon Frahling, its “servers have roamed the internet and have analysed and evaluated billions of multi-lingual texts”.
According to German IT news website Heise, the Chinese Ministry for Industry & Information Technology has selected Ubuntu as the basis for its reference architecture for operating systems. The China Software and Integrated Chip Promotions Centre (CSIP), part of the Industry & IT Ministry, Ubuntu manufacturer Canonical and the Chinese National University of Defence Technology (NUDT) are working to adapt the Chinese Kylin variant of Ubuntu to the requirements of the Chinese markets under the aegis of the CCN Open Source Innovation Joint Lab.
Ubuntu Kylin is to appear in April this year together with Ubuntu 13.04 with support for the input of Chinese symbols and the Chinese calendar and will integrate Chinese web services. The integration of Baidu Maps, the Chinese Amazon competitor Taobao, payment processes for Chinese banks and Chinese timetables and flight schedules is planned for subsequent versions. In addition, the WPS office suite, which is popular in China, is to be adapted for Kylin.
Ubuntu Kylin is to be widely used as the reference for a flexible, open operating system. The announcement of is part of a Chinese five year plan which should promote the use of open source software and speed up the development of an open source ecosystem.
The administration of justice in England has a long history. Nearly 800 years ago, on 15th June 1215, King John and 25 barons of the realm signed the Magna Carta Libertatum or The Great Charter of the Liberties of England (otherwise simply known as Magna Carta) in a field on an island in the Thames at Runnymede with 12 bishops and 20 abbots as witnesses.
If you’ve ever read it, you’ll know that Magna Carta is a curious hybrid of a document whose content ranges from the seemingly mundane, such as the removal of fish weirs on the rivers Thames and Medway, to such major legal concepts as trial by a jury of one’s peers and various rules for the administration of justice, which have been implemented by many other jurisdictions around the world, particularly those based on common law.
One of 4 surviving original copies of Magna Carta, now in the British Library
What has Magna Carta to do with the Ministry of Justice and Capita? The answer is the disastrous contract for interpreting in courts and tribunals which the Ministry of Justice – in its limited wisdom – handed over to Capita Translating & Interpreting/ALS (posts passim).
An English translation (the original text was drafted in Latin. Ed.) of Clause 40 of the original 1215 text reads:
To no one will we sell, to no one will we refuse or delay, right or justice.
If court proceedings cannot take place due to unqualified interpreters being sent to court by Capita T&I, or interpreters not showing up for court assignments, that sounds very much like justice being delayed and could even be bordering on refusal. By their cavalier attitude to the administration of justice, the Ministry of Justice (perhaps it should be renamed the Ministry of Injustice. Ed.) and Capita T&I are showing their contempt for eight centuries of English law.
This blog never ceases to be amazed at the mismanagement of the courts and tribunals interpreting service by Capita Translating & Interpreting/ALS (posts passim).
Under the title ‘Judge corrects a Capita Interpreter’, Linguist Lounge recently published the post by ‘Stranger’ quoted below, which is reposted here with the kind permission of the site administrators.
At court I fall into conversation with a Capita interpreter. She is North African and does Arabic. Prepared to do French too but only in simple cases. She tells Capita this but still gets sent to do a job at Bailey. The judge was French speaker and, she said, corrected her translation several times. She was greatly embarrassed and told Capita they shouldn’t have sent her. They told her that she should withdraw her name for French in that case. But they knew she wasn’t qualified for French, yet sent her to the court that deals with the most serious criminal matters.
If you are sending someone to the Bailey you know it is not to interpret for a defendant who has been caught speeding. She says that the admin staff at Capita didn’t have a clue what they were doing. She seemed very unhappy with her “employers”.
As pointed out by the original author, the Old Bailey doesn’t handle speeding offences. It is better known under its official title of the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales and deals with major criminal cases from Greater London and, in exceptional cases, from other parts of England and Wales. Were I the judge in that case, I would have had Capita Translating & Interpreting charged with contempt of court for not respecting the court’s authority.
To paraphrase the Duke of Edinburgh’s famous retort from 1962, the Bristol Post is a bloody awful newspaper. Every day it manages to show its ignorance of the districts of Bristol, greengrocer’s apostrophes are not unknown and the command of terminology shown by its journalists is abysmal.
For the benefit of passing Post journalists, I shall once again quote from that article about the difference between the two:
…here’s a brief explanation of the difference between interpreting and translation: interpreting deals with the spoken word, translation with the written word.
Simple isn’t it? So simple on would think even a Bristol Post hack would be able to understand the difference. 🙂
The two places where I’ve lived the longest are Bristol (where I’ve lived since graduation) and Market Drayton (where I grew up). These 2 places are ones I’d call home.
It’s therefore quite a surprise for me to find the two of them brought into close contact by a writer who lived 6 centuries ago.
I’m currently reading ‘The Maire of Bristowe is Kalendar’ by Richard Ricart, who became clerk to the Mayor of Bristol in 1478 in the reign of Edward IV, (re)printed in 1872 by the Camden Society and available from the Internet Archive.
Bristol as seen by Robert Ricart, clerk to the mayor
Ricart recorded Bristol’s history from 1217, mentioning the name of the mayor and other chief officers of the town (Bristol did not become a city until the reign of Henry VIII. Ed.), along with major national or local events.
Imagine my surprise at the following text – in the original Middle English – appearing at the end of the entry for 1459:
And the Sondaye by fore Mighelmas, James Lorde of Audeley was slayne at Blourehethe besides Drayton in the countee of Stafford.
In modern English: “And the Sunday before Michaelmas, James, Lord of Audley was slain at Blore Heath near Drayton in the county of Stafford”.
The Battle of Blore Heath, which was fought on 23rd September 1459, was an echo from my childhood: as a child I’d looked for Audley’s Cross – marking the spot where Audley allegedly fell – from the tops of buses, whilst a popular childhood haunt was Salisbury Hill just outside Market Drayton, so called because it was where Lord Salisbury’s troops had apparently spent the night before the battle.
In September 1459 the armies of the House of Lancaster and the House of York met on a damp Sunday morning at Blore Heath and fought the battle which would begin the English Wars of the Roses. Thousands of men from across England fought and died in a bloody battle, which lasted for the rest of that day.
Legend has it that Queen Margaret of Anjou watched the battle from the nearby Mucklestone church tower, only to flee when she realised her army had lost. A stone cross still stands on Blore Heath to this day, to mark the spot where the Lancastrian leader is said to have been killed.
The rolling disaster that is the Ministry of Justice’s Framework Agreement for court interpreting is a story that just seems to keep on giving, especially in terms of bad news.
Mirela Watson, an Essex-based Romanian interpreter, said other issues nationally have included a trial collapsing because an under-qualified interpreter failed to interpret properly, and another where a crown court judge recognised an interpreter as a convicted prostitute.
Earlier this week 
