According to an adage often attributed to Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, it’s popularly said that Britain and the USA are two countries divided by a common language.
I’m therefore wondering whether for reasons of homophony (particularly in view of some British regional accents. Ed,), this forthcoming American film starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford will be renamed for the British market… 😀
The media – and consequently the general public too – are always conflating translators and interpreters.
To help alleviate their ignorance a new graphic has been produced.
Hat tip: Anna Szenfeld.
The shadowy East Bristol Tourist Board has recently been in action, welcoming visitors to Barton Hill, an ancient settlement recorded as Barton [Regis] in the Gloucestershire pages of the 11th century Domesday Book.
Barton itself derives from the old English ‘bere-tun‘ corn farm, outlying grange of barley farm.
From the visit of the Domesday assessors to the present day much has changed. The area still has one church, now St Luke’s, but the two mills mentioned in 1086 have long vanished. However, the area’s changes over the centuries – and those of surrounding districts – are being charted by the Barton Hill History Group.
This cheery message above can be found at the junction of Ducie Road (formerly Pack Horse Lane; there’s a street name that could tell a story. Ed.) with Lawrence Hill.
Have a nice day, y’all! 😀
Update 20/08/17: The cheery welcome message has now been painted over. Does this mean visitors to Barton Hill are no longer welcome? In the immortal words of Private Eye: I think we should be told!
Evidence that accuracy is not a priority at the Temple Way Ministry of Truth abounds every day in the online edition of the Bristol Post.
Below is a screenshot of the most egregious example of a lack of quality control in what passes for today’s local news since the title’s takeover by the quality-unconscious Trinity Mirror plc.
For those interested, the title’s sub-editors, the people that exercised quality control over what was actually published, were all made redundant many years ago. It is now up to the folk who write the copy to check it themselves.
That being so, your correspondent does wonder whether standards of English language teaching have declined in the five and a half decades since he first entered full-time education, or whether the teaching he received was of an exceptional quality.
If you have any thoughts about the quality of media reporting or language teaching, please feel free to comment below.
Throughout my professional life, writing so that one’s meaning is clear and there is no room for misinterpretation has been of paramount importance.
However, writing without ambiguity is a skill that’s evidently bypassed those who currently write the news headlines for Yahoo’s UK website…
Enquiries are continuing as to how the cops came to be in the woman’s pyjamas in the first place. 😀
Yesterday, along with Kurt James, Bristol City Council’s co-ordinator for the Bristol Clean Streets campaign, and local resident Eric Green, I joined a group of volunteers from Tawfiq Mosque in Barton Hill (usually rendered as “Bart Nil” in the local vernacular. Ed.😉 ) for a community litter pick.
Starting at 10.30 in the morning, we split into 6 groups and tackled six different parts of the area for the next 2 hours, picking up litter and noting any larger, fly-tipped items for reporting later.
While picking, we did get passers-by thanking us for our efforts, but ultimately I’m sure all those taking part would prefer it if our fellow citizens didn’t mess the area up in the first place. 😀
It was a successful event and I was most encouraged by the cheerful enthusiasm and commitment of those involved. The photo below shows just some of the stuff we collected.
Your correspondent understands the mosque plans to make this a regular event. If so, I’ll try and get along again to assist.
In the meantime, if you spot a problem on a Bristol street, be it an abandoned vehicle, litter, fly-tipping, a blocked drain or anything else, please report it to the council for attention.
As a linguist one of the great developments in the way I work has been the development of online resources in recent years.
These vary from dictionaries to terminological databases and it’s one of the latter that this post is about.
Last week, IATE celebrated its tenth anniversary of being accessible to the public and proudly publicised its entry into double figures.
As can be seen from the screenshot IATE is short for InterActive Terminology for Europe; and it’s a great resource. Searches can be conducted in language pairs from the following languages:
Searches can also be refined by picking specialist subject areas from, for example, accounting to the wood industry.
It’s a particularly good resource for terminology involving the European institutions, political matters and international relations in general, but is also no slouch when it comes to specific terms for, say, forestry.
IATE is the EU’s inter-institutional terminology database. IATE has been used in the EU institutions and agencies since summer 2004 for the collection, dissemination and shared management of EU-specific terminology. The project partners are:
The project was launched in 1999 with the objective of providing a web-based infrastructure for all EU terminology resources, enhancing the availability and standardisation of the information.
IATE incorporates all of the existing terminology databases of the EU’s translation services into a single new, highly interactive and accessible inter-institutional database. Legacy databases from EU institutions have been imported into IATE, which now contains some 1.4 million multilingual entries.
The IATE website is administered by the Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union in Luxembourg on behalf of the project partners.
Having been produced at public expense, the entire database has been opened up to the public can be downloaded, all 1.4 million entries!
Happy birthday, IATE! Here’s to the next 10 years
The Bristol Post, the city’s newspaper of (warped) record, hasn’t had and doesn’t have a reputation for accuracy in reporting – a situation which has not improved since it and all the other Local World regional newspaper titles were taken over by Trinity Mirror.
This is more than evident in the title’s reporting of politics today.
The last (New) Labour government had a reputation for authoritarianism and what can best be described as “control-freakery“, so it is no surprise to see the Post assigning the comrades an authoritarian and control freak role amongst today’s headlines.
Mind how you go now! 😉
Furthermore, for the sake of balance and impartiality, the Post also includes some news of the Conservatives, as per the following screenshot.
At this point, a small history lesson might be in order.
The nickname of the Conservative and Unionist Party – to give them their full name – is the Tory Party.
As a piece of English vocabulary, Tory has interesting origins. Etymologically, it’s derived from the Middle Irish word tóraidhe, which equates in modern Irish to tóraà and to tòraidh in modern Scottish Gaelic. It has the meaning of outlaw, robber or brigand, from the Irish word tóir, meaning “pursuit”, since outlaws were “pursued men”.
It appears that since the term was coined, the Conservatives’ outlawry has expanded to encompass vandalism and careless driving. 😀
If more classes of crime can be ascribed to the party, please mention them in the comments below.
Update: as of this afternoon, one of these howlers has been corrected by the residents of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth. However, the Conservative Party are still responsible on the Post website for robbery and mayhem. 🙂
There are 6 days to go until the polls open for Theresa May’s snap election that she wasn’t going to call and the war of words is really hotting up.
This blog has previously drawn attention to Theresa May’s description of the Conservatives as the “Nasty Party” (posts passim) and how under her premiership, she and her members have striven to be as nasty as they can.
This has continued with increasing fury during the election campaign and has intensified as the Tories’ lead in the opinion polls has narrowed, as shown by this series of tweets by the party’s faithful in Grantham, birthplace of the grocer’s daughter who went on to become the Conservatives’ revered Leaderene (once known as the “Milk Snatcher”. Ed.).
In that series of postings, Lincolnshire Tories have been faithfully parroting the bile the party has been encouraging their allies in the right-wing mainstream media since their return to government in 2010.
Note too, the spelling error in the final tweet: “rouges” instead of “rogues“. It must be an orthographical error as I can conceive of no predictive text application that would come up with such a substitute.
Any rouge, otherwise known these days as blusher, is a cosmetic product and thus quite appropriate to this load of made-up nonsense. 🙂
Since the posting of those tweets, the account has been suspended by Twitter, most likely for abusive tweets and/or behaviour.
Who’s he?
Some obscure blues artist?
Not quite.
Read on.
Germany’s federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) has decided to cut out part of an English exam including a speech by a a member of Britain’s so-called royal family after thousands of students complained that they could not understand him, The Local reports.
On Tuesday North Rhine Westphalia’s school ministry announced it would be discarding part of a final English exam for 100,000 16 year-olds which involved their listening to a speech by young ‘Arry and then answering questions on it.
More than 45,000 examination candidates signed a petition after the test last week calling for a retake because of Mr Wales’ “mumbly” enunciation and the recording’s poor quality.
Regional teachers’ organisation Lehrer NRW commented that even mother tongue English teachers struggled to understand what he was saying.
There were also complaints about poor vocabulary preparation for other parts of the examination.
In response to the controversy, the NRW education ministry explained that markers would be given more leeway in assessing other areas of the test to account for what was taught in class.
In a press release (German), Lehrer NRW said that what was being proposed was a “fair solution“.