language

  • Golfing news

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media

    The time-honoured business practice of top executives celebrating POETS Day on the fairway has come in for criticism from an unlikely source.

    At a Conservative Way Forward event at Westminster last week, the current international trade secretary and disgraced former defence secretary Dr Liam Fox MP is reported to have said:

    We’ve got to change the culture in our country. People have got to stop thinking about exporting as an opportunity and start thinking about it as a duty – companies who could be contributing to our national prosperity but choose not to because it might be too difficult or too time-consuming or because they can’t play golf on a Friday afternoon.

    Meanwhile in golfing “olds”, in April 2015, the disgraced former defence secretary Dr Liam Fox MP tweeted the photo below when standing for re-election.

    tweet reads latest student golfer at Tickenham Golf Club @TickenhamGolf #GE2015

    There’s an old adage about glass houses and stones, isn’t there?

  • Chronicle exclusive: the vanishing station

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media, Oddities

    For local news Bath, Bristol’s near neighbour, is served by the Bath Chronicle. Like the Bristol Post, the Chronicle is part of the Local World group and shares its close neighbour’s reputation for (lack of) accuracy.

    Today’s Bath Chronicle carried an exclusive, but readers had to read the caption under the photograph accompanying the report to realise it.

    Bath Spa railway station used to look as shown in the photograph below.

    Bath Spa railway station
    Bath Spa railway station. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

    Close observation of today’s Bath Chronicle report, especially the photo caption, reveals there is no nowhere for InterCity 125s or any other passenger rolling stock to stop where Bath Spa station once stood.

    photo caption on Chronicle piece reads Bath Spa railway statio Trains to London Paddington and Bristol Temple Meads delayed or cancelled
    The site of Bath Spa railway station according to the Bath Chronicle

    For the life of me I cannot understand why the Chronicle ignored the disappearance of a major piece of transport infrastructure and had its piece concentrate on delays to train services between the West of England and London Paddington. 😉

  • 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.

  • Trip Advisor under fire over Welsh reviews

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Tech

    Trip Advisor, the world’s largest travel site, is under fire from Welsh speakers for refusing to publish reviews in Welsh, the Daily Post reports.

    Welsh flag

    Tour guide Emrys Llewelyn had posted a bilingual review of Caernarfon‘s Blas restaurant, but was told by Trip Advisor it wouldn’t be published because it wasn’t one of the site’s current 28 languages, which include Finnish, Serbian, Slovak and Vietnamese.

    According to the Daily Post, Mr Llewelyn said: “Trip Advisor’s attitude is disgusting. They do not recognise our language nor culture.”

    In response Trip Advisor stated the company was looking at expanding the number of languages used on the site, but added the following:

    Unfortunately, the process of adding new languages to Trip Advisor is one that does take a significant amount of time and investment – it is not simply a ‘flick of the switch’ process. The reason for this is that, in order to maintain the integrity of our site, we must ensure that every language in which we operate is fully integrated into our moderation and fraud detection tools and processes.

  • Grauniad corrects itself

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media

    Along with the majority of the press, those writing for The Guardian occasionally confuse the written and spoken word when two languages are involved; somehow the British media have great difficulty telling translators and interpreters apart (posts passim).

    Yesterday The Guardian acknowledged its errors by publishing the following correction and clarification.

    One article (Merkel backs May’s decision not to trigger Brexit until next year, 21 July, page 6) referred to the chancellor “speaking in German with an official translator”, and another (No free trade without open borders, Hollande tells May, 22 July, page 1) referred to the president “speaking in French with an official translator”. While Collins dictionary says “translator” can mean “a person or machine that translates speech or writing”, our style guide advises using “interpreter” for people who work with the spoken word, and “translator” for those who work with the written word.

    Well done Grauniad; I’m glad your style guide acknowledges the correct use of terminology.

    Hat tip: Yelena McCafferty

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