Steve Woods | Steve Woods

Tomorrow is Global Accessibility Awareness Day

08/05/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Open Standards, Politics, Social Media, Tech
We learn from Accessible Bristol that tomorrow, Thursday 9th May is Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD). On that day people all over the world will be coming together to spread the word about accessibility and Accessible Bristol will be among them.

Throughout the day the Accessible Bristol team be on Twitter answering your questions about technology and accessibility, as well as tweeting useful accessibility tips and resources.

Tweet your questions to @AccessibleBrstl and use the #GAAD hashtag to keep track of Global Accessibility Awareness Day activities.

However, Accessible Bristol also has a challenge for the people in Bristol and the South West for 9th May and challenge you to do at least one of the following things on 9th May:
- Go mouseless for an hour (touch screen devices don’t count);
- Surf the web with a screen reader for an hour;
- Create a captions file and share it with the video’s owner;
- Write a blog post or make a video about the way you use and experience the web.
This post originally appeared on Bristol Wireless.
Lost ferrets

07/05/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Oddities

Over the long weekend I took a walk over Purdown and through Eastville Park in Bristol, enjoying the sunny weather.

Spring has finally arrived, as shown by the appearance of cowslips in the old pasture on Purdown.

Primula veris – the common cowslip

However, I was more intrigued by the ‘Lost Ferrets’ posters I saw descending towards the park at Snuff Mills.

Lost ferrets!
Anonymous Capita linguist writes to Helen Grant

06/05/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

Helen Grant MP
The letter below, originally posted on RPSI Linguist Lounge, has been sent to Helen Grant MP, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice, in response to the recent announcement of an increase in the remuneration for linguists employed under the MoJ’s contract with Capita Translation & Interpreting (posts passim), an increase which will be borne by the taxpayer, not the contractor.

Dear Helen Grant,

I would like to congratulate you on increasing ‘the take-home pay of interpreters’. But this isn’t going to really change anything at all for interpreters in providing a better service as this increase is VERY minimal, as this still doesn’t fully cover the travel expenses of getting to a job location. There are very few of us who can afford to work full-time as a public service interpreter with the possibility of only earning £13.32 in a day (before tax). The calculations show that Capita does not even guarantee a rate equal to the minimum wage and at best the gross hourly rate for half a day at court has been reduced by 57.85% (even at the previous enhanced mileage rate of 40 [pence] per mile).

So what NEEDS to happen is: Tier 1 Police interpreting jobs need to be paid a premium of about £30 per hour with FULL travel expenses covered, door to door travel mileage at a rate of £0.40 per mile and full travel time of £10 an hour, to ensure interpreters/translators accept the assignment and arrive at the immediate police job as soon as possible, as most Police jobs are emergencies and are needed very quickly, otherwise the ‘criminal’ will have to either stay in custody till a interpreter arrives (which could take days, with the low pay for interpreters) OR they can just be freed on bail back on to the streets, so they can re-offend and make the streets even less safe.

Also the mileage rate needs to become £0.40 per mile across the board; so Tier 1, 2 and 3 because as I said the current £0.20 rate is just horrendous, making it not even viable to even head out to go to a job assignment because the interpreters will still be making a loss at the end of the day!

If you listen to what I am trying to say, you will find out that this will, in essence, bring the full qualified interpreters back to the court room and make justice possible!

How can you do this to interpreters which have trained for many years to get to where they’re to then be paid a minimum wage?! No wonder they’ve boycotted Capita! They deserve to be paid a way more than what is currently being paid. So when the rates eventually rise, then we shall see very positive work from Interpreters and Translators. But hopefully you will fix this issue because at the end of the day, this just isn’t fair on the interpreters, translators, solicitors, barristers and judges.

I hope to see a reply from you.

Kind Regards
Contribute to Wikimedia Commons from your smartphone

06/05/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Data, Open Source, Tech

Login screen on the Commons Android app
Wikimedia Commons is a great resource: nearly 17 mn. freely usable media files that anyone can use for any purpose and to which anyone can contribute too!

Making contributions to Wikimedia Commons is also getting easier: it’s now possible to transfer images to the Commons database from an Android or iOS smartphone using a free and advert-free mobile app. Features include the ability to view a stream of your contributions, upload multiple files and export to Commons using – if you’re on Android – that phone’s share functionality. Your images will also be tagged with the GPS co-ordinates if GPS tagging is turned on.

Wikimedia points out that by uploading your files to Commons, contributors will be doing more than if they just shared them with friends: they’ll be contributing the goal of spreading free knowledge around the world and sharing their work with billions of Wikipedia readers around the world (Wikipedia is the fifth most visited website in the world. Ed.).

The Android app is available from Google Play, whilst the Apple Store features the iOS app.

The developers also hope to add more features in future and make it easier to browse and discover all the great content Commons has to offer.

The app development team would like you to report any bugs, as well as giving them your suggestions for new features.
LibreOffice 4.0.3 RC3 released

06/05/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech

The third release candidate (RC) for LibreOffice 4.0.3 is now available for download for evaluation and testing, etc.

As usual, the development team stress that using LibreOffice pre-release builds for “mission-critical” purposes is not recommended.

LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

Potential users are also advised to consult the Releases Notes.

When you visit the download page, it will try to detect the visitor’s system and offer the visitor the right download automatically, but may not succeed in all cases.

People who are interested in even more bleeding-edge binaries of LibreOffice’s current development are advised to try the nightly builds. However, those are potentially even less suitable for productive work, provided by individual contributors and have not been approved in any way by a quality assurance process. Caveat emptor.
“Rock solid” Debian 7 released

06/05/2013 Steve WoodsLinux, Open Source, Tech
On 4th May, Debian made the following announcement concerning the release of Debian 7.0, the latest stable release of this venerable Linux distribution.
After many months of constant development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 7.0 (code name “Wheezy”).

This new version of Debian includes various interesting features such as multiarch support, several specific tools to deploy private clouds, an improved installer and a complete set of
multimedia codecs and front-ends which remove the need for third-party repositories.

Multiarch support, one of the main release goals for Wheezy, will allow Debian users to install packages from multiple architectures on the same machine. This means that you can now, for the first time, install both 32- and 64-bit software on the same machine and have all the relevant dependencies correctly resolved, automatically.

The installation process has been greatly improved: Debian can now be installed using software speech, above all by visually impaired people who do not use a Braille device. Thanks to the combined efforts of a huge number of translators, the installation system is available in 73 languages and more than a dozen of them are available for speech synthesis too.

In addition, for the first time, Debian supports installation and booting using UEFI for new 64-bit PCs (amd64), although there is no support for Secure Boot yet.

This release includes numerous updated software packages, such as:
With this broad selection of packages, Debian once again stays true to its goal of being the universal operating system. It is suitable for many different use cases: from desktop systems to netbooks; from development servers to cluster systems; and for database, web, or storage servers. At the same time, additional quality assurance efforts like automatic installation and upgrade tests for all packages in Debian’s archive ensure that Wheezy fulfils the high expectations that users have of a stable Debian release. It is rock solid and rigorously tested.

You can install Debian on computers ranging from handheld systems to supercomputers, and on nearly everything in between. A total of nine architectures are supported: 32-bit PC / Intel IA-32 (i386), 64-bit PC / Intel EM64T / x86-64 (amd64), Motorola/IBM PowerPC (powerpc), Sun/Oracle SPARC (sparc), MIPS (mips (big-endian) and mipsel (little-endian)), Intel Itanium (ia64), IBM S/390 (31-bit s390 and 64-bit s390x) and ARM EABI (armel for older hardware and armhf for newer hardware using hardware floating-point).

Want to give it a try?
If you want to simply try it without having to install it, you can use a special image, known as a live image, available for CDs, USB sticks, and netboot set-ups. Initially, these images are provided for the amd64 and i386 architectures only. It is also possible to use these live images to install Debian. More information is available from the Debian Live homepage.

If, instead, you want to directly install it, you can choose among various installation media, such as Blu-ray Discs, DVDs, CDs and USB sticks, or from the network. Several desktop environments – GNOME, KDE Plasma Desktop and Applications, Xfce, and LXDE – may be installed through CD images; the desired one may be chosen from the boot menus of the CDs/DVDs. In addition, multi-architecture CDs and DVDs are available which support installation of multiple architectures from a single disc. Or you can always create bootable USB installation media (see the Installation Guide for more details).

The installation images may be downloaded right now via bittorrent (the recommended method), jigdo, or HTTP; see Debian on CDs for further information. Wheezy will soon be available on physical DVD, CD-ROM, and Blu-ray Discs from numerous vendors, too.

Already a happy Debian user and you only want to upgrade?
Upgrades to Debian 7.0 from the previous release, Debian 6.0 (codenamed “Squeeze”), are automatically handled by the apt-get package management tool for most configurations. As always, Debian systems may be upgraded painlessly, in place, without any forced downtime, but it is strongly recommended to read the release notes as well as the installation guide for possible issues and for detailed instructions on installing and upgrading. The release notes will be further improved and translated [in]to additional languages in the weeks after the release.
I’ve been using Wheezy on my laptop since release candidate 1 and can testify to it being rock solid and reliable. In particular, the screen display seems much more stable than it ever did under Ubuntu. Indeed the only problems I had with installing Wheezy were getting the wifi working (simply a matter of downloading and installing the correct firmware for the Broadcom chip on the card) and forgetting to install such little extras as libdvdcss2 so I could watch DVDs.

Why have I changed from Ubuntu? Unfortunately, the long-term support (updates) for the version I was running (10.0.4) runs out this month and subsequent versions have switched to the Unity desktop (not my favourite). I still regard Ubuntu as a great distribution, especially for beginners, to whom I’d recommend it for ease of use. Furthermore, for those who dislike Unity, there’s always the KDE-based Kubuntu, of course… 🙂
Interpreter perverting the course of justice?

03/05/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

The Ipswich Star reports today that interpreter is under investigation following the collapse of a trial, in which she was said to have coached a victim of alleged grievous bodily harm while he was giving his evidence in a case at Ipswich Crown Court.

The trial was in its third day when Recorder Peter Wallis discharged the jury, stating that the interpreter was not reliable.

One of the 3 defendants in the dock clearly heard the Tamil interpreter from 25 feet as witness Niruban Amirthalingham was about to resume his testimony.

The female interpreter could now face possible charges of contempt of court or perverting the course of justice.

The incident took place after the trial resumed after lunch on Tuesday.

Some 5-10 minutes into the cross-examination of Mr. Amirthalingham by Matthew Jewell, representing defendant Karunanidhy Nallathamby – one of 3 defendants in the case – the barrister’s attention was drawn to his client wishing to speak to him.

Mr. Jewell subsequently asked for an adjournment, requesting that the jury, witness and interpreter leave the court.

The barrister then told Recorder Wallis his client had heard the interpreter tell Mr. Amirthalingham in Tamil before the jury returned to court: “If you get a chance tell them they snatched the bar from you.”

The Crown brought its own interpreter to court yesterday (Thursday) to verify what was being alleged by Mr. Nallathamby.

Mr. Jewell pointed out the court did not know if any other exchanges had previous taken place between the the interpreter and the witness.

Recorder Wallis remarked that on the face of things the interpreter’s action it was not merely contempt of court and could constitute a case of perverting the course of justice.

Crown Court trials are believed to cost at least £3,000 a day, so this trial had already cost the public purse £9,000 before collapsing due to an unprofessional interpreter.
Yelena writes: Capita interpreting contract 15 months on

02/05/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media

The court interpreting contract with Capita has now been in place for 15 months and we have read and heard about a “significant” improvement of service over the time. If you look at it objectively, the initial reports from courts indicated that the service was so abysmally poor, it couldn’t possibly get any worse. And “improvement” is a relative notion. If the MoJ means the number of people Capita is now able to send to courts to do the job of court interpreting, then Capita is now probably able to supply more people than 15 months ago. However, where the issue of an improvement is questionable is in the lack of quality control and monitoring. The current contract allows Capita to send under-qualified people with limited experience or no experience in the legal setting.

If you look at the most recent statistics published in March, the service performance has actually dropped while the number of complaints has increased and it’s in thousands.

Moreover, the recent figures conveniently don’t include the statistics on interpreting jobs which go to interpreters direct or other agencies. 15 months on, the court service has still got a provisional emergency measure in place allowing it to use suppliers other than Capita for certain hearings. In Lincolnshire, for example, for remand and warrant hearings, the police do not go to Capita following an appalling experience they had with Capita for the first month of service. And while the Ministry of Justice refuses to publish the spending on interpreters outside of the Capita contract, the Ministers now claim they saved 15 million pounds with Capita last year. The statement is indeed very questionable as there was never an accurate figure of interpreting spending before the current contract. There is simply nothing to compare the current spending with.

Furthermore, no one seems to be taking into account all of the auxiliary costs: the cost of adjournments, unnecessary remands, solicitors’ time and court time. If it costs at least £110 a minute to run a court room with a jury, calculations are easy to make to see how much it costs the tax-payer when an interpreter is late or doesn’t show up.

Is the current deal really good for the tax-payer? Should Capita be asked to pay all of these costs? If G4S paid handsomely for the cock-ups with supplying security staff for the London Olympics last year, can Capita pick up the bill for the additional costs the court service has incurred as a result of an abysmal performance? But no, the MoJ went further and last week announced they were changing the contract terms and making the tax-payer pay more which, according to Helen Grant, is “affordable”. This website has pointed out on numerous occasions how costly the contract has proved to be for Capita plc. The company has been subsidising their linguists’ travel expenses a substantial amount of which were public transport tickets. The MoJ has now forced the tax-payer to pay linguists’ mileage rates for the whole journey, even though at a low rate of 20 p per mile, plus £7.50 per day for incidentals. This way the MoJ appears to have relieved Capita of substantial outgoings they incurred by reimbursing their linguists’ public transport tickets in the hope that linguists will continue to travel even where mileage calculations and the incidentals allowance don’t cover the total actual cost of travelling. If those linguists on the wheels may benefit from the new terms a little, others who previously had their fares fully reimbursed may feel badly let down by Capita/MoJ acting on behalf of the tax-payer.

Capita’s performance has always varied from region to region and it won’t be long until we see how the recent changes have further affected the level of service. We already have reports that some courts avoid even placing requests with Capita, going to interpreters direct straight away. Other courts have made up their own lists of interpreters who they call when Capita can’t supply. A couple of weeks ago a scam was also described on Twitter, whereby a network of Capita linguists are alleged to cancel Capita jobs at the last minute waiting for relevant courts to call them or their colleagues within the network in despair direct at the old National Agreement rates.

The question of the last 15 months has been the same: how long is the government prepared to let Capita get away with a service no commercial company would tolerate? When facts and even their own published figures speak for themselves, why is it allowed to continue? This contract should be scrapped as unsalvageable and lessons should be learnt in that outsourcing of niche services very rarely works.

Two parliamentary hearings, the Public Accounts Committee and the Justice Select Committee have revealed that the contract is fundamentally flawed: the current set up has breached various terms of the Framework Agreement it’s supposed to operate under. It is flawed to the core and it should be abandoned before a serious miscarriage of justice happens. Those who think interpreters for foreign nationals are only a burden on the public purse must remember that it’s not just defendants who require interpreters, it may be victims of crime who want justice to be done too. If anyone who undervalues the role of a professional court interpreter happened to be a key witness or a victim of a crime and the case against the criminal collapsed because of poor interpreting, what would they say?

Reposted from the Linguist Lounge blog with additional links.
CERN restores first ever website

01/05/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Tech

In honour of the 20th anniversary of the release of libwww into the public domain (posts passim), CERN has restored the first ever website at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

As screenshot of the front page of this historic site is shown below. The links on the pages are active too!

The world’s first ever website. Click on the image for the full version

Well done CERN.
Translators and interpreters – the illustrated guide

30/04/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Tech

In the past this blog has drawn attention to the sloppy use of terminology by the BBC and others, confusing translators with interpreters.

As some media types seem incapable of dealing with too many words, here’s a handy illustrated guide for them (all images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons).

Firstly, a translator in the pre-digital age.

A pre-digital age translator at work

The bearded chap scribbling away is St. Jerome, one of the fathers of the Catholic Church, renowned for his translation into Latin of the Vulgate Bible.

Nowadays, a modern translator is more likely to be scribbling away using the kit in the picture below.

A modern translator’s desk

Note the keyboard, screen and dictionaries. The written word is clearly involved here.

Next we have a couple of conference interpreters.

Conference interpreters in action

Note the use of headsets and microphones. The spoken word is in evidence here.

However, interpreters sometimes use the written word to take notes, as shown here, but this is merely to assist in remembering long passages of spoken words.

On the left Mahmoud Abbas, on the right Barack Obama. Between them sits a White House interpreter taking notes while POTUS speaks.

Confused by translators and interpreters? You shouldn’t be! We’re here to help nation write and speak respectively to nation! 😉

Posts navigation