facepalm

  • Guardian latest media outlet to confuse translators and interpreters

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Tech

    The Guardian, immortalised in Private Eye as The Grauniad for its error-prone typographical propensities, now reveals its errors are not restricted to orthography.

    The home page of today’s online edition has a link to an item on machine translation and online translation tools. The perils of machine translation is a topic which has also featured on this blog (posts passim).

    However, the link to the report is illustrated by an image depicting interpreters at work, as the following screenshot shows.

    screenshot from Guardian website

    This means The Guardian is now the latest media outlet in the UK willing to employ illiterates who can’t tell interpreters from translators along with the likes of the BBC (posts passim) and the Bristol Post (posts passim).

    This blog has a handy illustrated guide on the difference between these two sorts of linguists should employees of any of the above organisations need enlightenment.

  • Bristol Post Balls – spelling it out

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    Thursday saw the launch of the latest Apple iPhone models – the 5C and 5S – when scores of people with more money than sense queued overnight to make an elitist US technology company even richer.

    Naturally the Bristol Post covered it in Friday’s edition as there’s an Apple shop in Bristol’s monument to Mammon otherwise known as Cabot Circus.

    Part of the Post’s coverage consisted of a photo gallery, which featured as follows in its news section.

    screenshot of Bristol Post gallery item

    How does one spell queue? Certainly not how the Post has done.

    This crime against orthography is also perpetuated on the gallery page itself.

  • Made redundant? No, I was ‘catalyzed’

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Politics, Social Media

    For decades, managers have been trying to come up with anodyne terms for dismissing people and making them redundant.

    Some of the more common ones are: give someone their notice, get rid of, discharge, terminate; lay off; sack, give someone the sack, fire, boot out, give someone the boot, give someone their marching orders, show someone the door, can, pink-slip; cashier.

    Following this trend, bosses at Bristol City Council have now come up with another, ‘to catalyze’, as evidenced by a mole down the Counts Louse (since renamed ‘City Hall’ by Mayor Red Trousers (posts passim). Ed.) who tweeted the following yesterday.

    screenshot of BCCDisgruntled tweet

    I’m sure all employees of the council are reassured that the management has their best interests at heart by not wanting to hurt their feelings as they’re unceremoniously handed their P45s and shown the door.

  • Bristol Post Balls – the featured image

    Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities

    As any journalist knows, an appropriate picture can add interest to what would otherwise be a dull story. However, what a quay full of cars has to do with a report on school expansion in Portishead, only the Bristol Post knows.

    screenshot from Bristol Post website

    Evidently, the above image is so good, the Post decided to use it a second time for a completely unrelated report into Frenchay Hospital.

    sxcreenshot from Bristol Post website

    Both screenshots were taken from the Bristol Post website at about 7.00 a.m. on Friday. However, the ‘featured image’ might have changed by the time you read the articles. 🙂

  • Bristol Post Balls – is the paper now written by greengrocer’s?

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    The greengrocers’ – or superfluous – apostrophe has a special place if one’s selling bananas (shouldn’t that be banana’s? Ed.), but it looks sadly out of place in Bristol’s newspaper of record, which is what happened yesterday in this heartening story from the St George area of the city.

    The offending punctuation even had the temerity to turn up in the item’s opening sentence, as follows:

    Crofts End Church in St George has just opened the doors to it’s newly refurbished internet suite.

    No doubt the bosses at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth believe the downward spiral in quality is a small price to pay for what they’re saving by not employing sub-editors.

  • Bristol Post Balls – headline news

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    This blog has before drawn attention to the difficulty of devising an apposite newspaper headline (posts passim).

    No such troubles beset the Bristol Post as shown by the following headlines from today’s News section of the online version.

    screenshot of Bristol Post
    Read all about it! Click on image for the full-sized version.

    One question remains: one’s written in English, but in what language are the other two written?

    Just minutes after I’d tweeted the existence of this post, the headlines to the reports were changed, such is the power of blogging (and such is the care and attention the Bristol Post lavishes on its online version. Ed.). 🙂

    Update 07/09/13: I’ve since been informed as follows by the Post’s Vicki Mathias regarding what occurred:

    I think it might be subeditors’ code for I’ll put a headline in here later- uploaded automatically by mistake due to technical quirk.

  • FA Cup ignored by BBC

    Steve WoodsMedia, Oddities

    This weekend marks the start of the competition for the FA Cup, the most prestigious trophy in English football, with the start of the preliminary round, when all the amateur teams in the local leagues around the country have their chance of a cup run for glory, i.e. it’s the round where all the Davids battle it out for a chance to challenge Goliath.

    By way of an example, Market Drayton Town, the team from the town of my birth, has a home tie today against Kidsgrove Athletic, which kicks off at 3 pm.

    The FA website has a list of fixtures for the preliminary round, which runs to many pages, a screenshot of which is shown below.

    screenshot of FA Cup fixtures page

    However, if – as many people do – you relied on the BBC as a source of sports news, you’d be completely unaware of the existence of the FA Cup preliminary round, as proven by the following screenshot taken today at the same time as the above FA screenshot.

    screenshot of BBC FA Cup fixtures page

    That’s right! According to Auntie, there are no FA Cup fixtures for the next 7 days.

    The BBC likes to base its reputation on its reliable and accurate coverage of news and events.

    Is this reputation undeserved? Answers in the comments below please.

  • Bristol Post Balls – verb conjugation

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

    The Bristol Post website carries an initial report today of a fire last night at Ashton Court, a 17th century mansion house in north Somerset owned by Bristol City Council.

    Allegedly penned by someone called DanielEvans1, the third paragraph of the piece reads as follows:

    A total of six Avon Fire and Rescue pumps and an aerial appliance were need to extinguish the fire in the early hours.

    An inability to conjugate the verb ‘to need’ correctly is evidently no barrier to employment as a journalist at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth. 😉

  • Bristol Post Balls – the ghost train

    Steve WoodsBristol, Media, Oddities

    Yesterday’s Bristol Post featured a report on convicted murderer Paul Flint, who has absconded from Ford Open Prison in Sussex.

    Flint is believed to be in the Bristol area, the evidence for which is included in the following sentence:

    The latest reported sighting of Flint was on a train at Bristol Parkway station, heading towards Westbury-on-Trym, shortly after 6.20pm on Tuesday.

    There’s one major problem with that statement: no railway line runs between Bristol Parkway and Westbury-on-Trym. The closest any line runs to Westbury-on-Trym is the Henbury Loop line (posts passim), which has been closed to passenger traffic since 1964.

    Is there a chance that reporter Daniel Evans was confusing Westbury-on-Trym with Westbury in Wiltshire, which does have a functioning railway station – or does he live in a Bristol in a parallel universe where public transport provision is excellent? 😉

Posts navigation