facepalm

  • Post exclusive! Soccer slump leads to bank branch closures

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities, Tech

    A strange phenomenon is occurring in Bristol: people not playing football is resulting in the closure of bank branches in the city.

    The source of this curious news is the ever (un)reliable Bristol Post, which yesterday carried a story headlined: “Two HSBC banks to shut in Bristol following slump in customers“.

    The relevant section is shown in the following screenshot*.

    relevant sentence reads There has been a 40 per cent reduction in football in just five years across all of HSBC's branches

    Either football is vital to the survival of HSBC bank branches or there’s a typographical error in the third sentence.

    To help readers decide which of the two above alternatives is correct, your correspondent has not noticed that the floors of HSBC bank branches are marked out with white lines to resemble football pitches.

    As a final thought and a bit of idle speculation, are more errors creeping in to news reports appearing online due to modern “journalists” working with predictive text options switched on?

    * = The article’s copy has since been amended with “footfall” replacing “football” in the third paragraph.

  • Translation error causes product recall

    Steve WoodsLanguage

    A translation error wrongly mentioning “alcohol” in the Arabic list of ingredients resulted in Dubai Municipality recalling Milka Oreo chocolate bars last Thursday, Gulf News reports.

    Milka & Oreo bars

    Dubai’s Food Safety Department said the recall followed rumours in social media that these chocolate bars contain alcohol.

    A spokesman told Gulf News the following:

    We received the rumour for clarification through our WhatsApp service and we checked the product. Samples were tested and we found that there is no alcohol in the product. But the problem was a wrong translation of the product label.

    The wrongly translated ingredient was chocolate liquor, i.e. semi-solid cocoa paste, the second element of which – liquor- the translator had wrongly translated “alcoholic beverages”.

    The Food Safety Department also contacted the manufacturer to correct the error and gave reassurances that the bar were halal and therefore safe for consumption by Muslims.

  • Bing: tin-eared translation

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Social Media, Tech

    When it comes to machine translation online, Google Translate and Microsoft’s Bing Translator are serious rivals, not only for custom, but also for the awful quality of the translations they provide.

    Social media platform Twitter has – for reasons best known to itself – decided to use Bing to provide translations of tweets in languages other than the user’s mother tongue.

    However, it’s not very good, suffering as it does from an inability to deal with context.

    Take the screenshot below from a tweet posted by your correspondent earlier this afternoon, who clicked on the Bing translation link out of curiosity.

    screenshot showing dreadful Bing translation

    Bing has managed to mangle my tweet, which contains a colloquial French expression (i.e. “du bidon“) into the incomprehensible “your reporting is Tin“, complete with capitalisation that was not in my original text. Bidon can indeed be a tin – or can or container – in French, but it also has the meaning of belly or stomach too. Furthermore, besides being a noun, bidon can also be used an an adjective, in which context it means phony or bogus.

    Wordreference.com has a brief forum thread on the phrase “c’est du bidon“, which passing Bing Translation developers may like to read.

    In the meantime, if any readers out there are contemplating saving money by using online translation tools instead of a human being, you may like to reconsider.

    Readers interested in why I was retweeting something aimed at the Mail Online website may like to read Tim Fenton’s post debunking the Mail’s Bataclan torture rumours.

  • Spelling IS important

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Oddities, Politics, Social Media

    As someone who’s worked with language for the best part of four decades, your correspondent recognises the importance of correct spelling.

    One area where this matters more is people’s names, something which the fourth estate doesn’t always manage correctly; for instance, a couple of years ago in a piece in the Bristol Post in which I was quoted my surname mysteriously changed from Woods to Wood halfway through.

    However, it’s not just journalists who get proper names wrong. Here’s a fine blunder from former Labour leader Ed Miliband on Twitter.

    tweet in which Miliband confuses home secretary with porn star

    One question remains: would an actress/glamour model make a better replacement prime minister than an authoritarian home secretary?

  • Diversifying greengrocer?

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities

    An A-board spotted today on Redcliffe Hill, Bristol 1.

    sign reads we repair Mac's PC and laptops

    A number of questions arose in your correspondent’s head upon seeing this.

    Firstly, who is Mac and why is this exclusive service being offered to him/her in respect of computer hardware?

    Would the owner of the sign fix my broken kit if my name wasn’t Mac?

    Has a greengrocer diversified into the hardware repair business?

    I think we should be told. 🙂

  • Postballs – Boxer dies when asked by Bristol’s Mayor

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    Like many, I was saddened to hear of the death of Muhammad Ali. As a young lad growing up in the 1960s and keen on sport of all kinds, he was a large presence on the TV sports programmes and the newspaper sports pages.

    His achievements in the ring and his stand against conscription and the Vietnam War helped reinforce his reputation: he really did end up as “the greatest“.

    However, news emerges via the Bristol Post that Ali’s death may not be all it seems: Muhammad’s demise could have been at the behest of Marvin Rees, Bristol’s newly elected mayor.

    first paragraph reads The Big Screen Bristol in Millennium Square will show the memorial service of Muhammad Ali who died last week at the personal request of the city's mayor Marvin Rees

    However, as per usual, it is merely a case of the endemic bad use of English, appalling grammar and ambiguity by the Post’s semi-literate hacks.

    In contrast, Ali was renowned for his eloquence and use of the English language, something which the current crop of Post journalists will never, ever emulate.

  • Bristol Post balls – man concealed by sound

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

    One of the joys of the illiteracy of the Bristol Post – the city’s newspaper of warped record – is the unintentional humour the manifestations of that lack of skill inspire.

    Such an instance occurred yesterday when the Post reported, with a local angle of course, on the reopening of the inquest into the victims of the Birmingham pub bombing by the IRA on 21st November 1974.

    One of the survivors – Frank Thomas – now happens to live in Bristol and the Post’s reported duly managed to get rumble and rubble confused, as shown in the following screenshot of the article’s first paragraph.

    text in image reads For 20 minutes Frank Thomas lay hidden under rumble while emergency services struggled to rescue bodies from a Birmingham pub

    Should any passing Post hack wish to avoid future confusion, the definitions of rumble and rubble are helpfully transcribed below from Cambridge Dictionaries Online.

    Rumble (n.) – a low continuous sound.

    Rubble (n.) the piles of broken stone and bricks, etc. that are left when a building falls down or is destroyed.

  • Red card for Auntie

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Social Media

    With the notable exception of Test Match Special‘s cricket commentary on long wave, BBC sports commentators seem to be employed more for their ability to shout than proficiency in the English language, judging from the rare bits of sports commentary that get broadcast as part of Radio 4’s news bulletins.

    This opinion received further support yesterday when the BBC Sport Twitter account sought the views of Aston Villa FC fans on news that the club at the bottom of the Premier League (that’s the English First Division in old money. Ed. 🙂 ) table would be playing in the Championship (the old Second Division. Ed.) next year, as per the following tweet, which has since been deleted:

    tweet reads Lescott says being relegated is a wait off the shoulders. What do you want to hear #AVFC fans?

    Wait off the shoulders, Auntie? This blog is giving you a red card and you should now proceed from the field of play for an early bath and thence to your reserved place in Heterograph Corner! 🙂

    Hat tip: OwlofMinera.

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