language | Steve Woods

Bristol Post Balls – an embarrassing vowel movement in public

18/10/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Media

There’s hardly a day goes by without the Bristol Post screwing up somewhere.

Today it features a glowing review of veteran US three part vocal harmony and guitar group Crosby, Stills & Nash.

However, at one point the language is not so much glowing as glaringly wrong when Mr Harnell trips over a near homophone:

Despite hoovering up the Gross National Product of Columbia in his darkest days, David Crosby’s voice remains a thing of wonder.

Columbia? The female personification of the United States of America?

I think the reviewer had got his vowels muddled and actually meant Colombia, a South American country famous for the supply of a variety of white nasal decongestant allegedly enjoyed at one time by Mr Crosby.
PI4J survey

16/10/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

Professional Interpreters for Justice (PI4J), the umbrella group for interpreter organisations, has been campaigning since 2011 against the Ministry of Justice’s Framework Agreement and outsourcing of criminal justice interpreting to Capita Translation & Interpreting (formerly Applied Language Solutions/ALS).

PI4J, in conjunction with Involvis, has just launched an online survey for interpreters (its fourth. Ed.) and, as well as hearing from interpreters about their current situation and thoughts about the future, also wants to hear interpreters’ views about PI4J and how they see its role. Should PI4J continue and if so, what is its primary role?

The Capita T&I contract ends in October 2016 but re-tendering will begin much sooner and PI4J’s focus needs to be on what happens next.

The survey will be open for responses until 10pm on Sunday 20th October 2013.

Take the survey.
An apposite typo?

10/10/2013 Steve WoodsBristol, Language, Oddities, Politics

I’m not a regular reader of the minutes of meetings of Bristol City Council’s Audit Committee. However, there’s an absolute corker of a typographical error on page 3 of the draft minutes of its 24th September 2013 meeting (PDF).

Will anyone down at the Counts Louse (as real Bristolians call or) or City Hall (as the Mayor has renamed it) be eagle-eyed enough to notice?

Under no circumstances Lord Fraud should not be confused with Lord Freud, a Conservative peer who only pretends to be a Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Department for Work and Pensions with responsibility for welfare reform. 😉
Guardian latest media outlet to confuse translators and interpreters

26/09/2013 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.

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

21/09/2013 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.

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

This crime against orthography is also perpetuated on the gallery page itself.
Argentina introduces Huayra Linux

19/09/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Linux, Politics, Tech

The Argentine state has developed its own Linux distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux, Germany’s Heise reports. Huayra Linux (the word huayra is from Quechua and means wind) is part of the Conectar Igualdad programme, which is aimed at closing the digital divide in Argentina by equipping schools better. Three million netbooks were handed out to pupils and teachers under this programme between 2010 and 2012. Huayra Linux is an important building block for achieving this programme’s goals since it frees users from reliance on proprietary software suppliers, such as Microsoft.
Language row over new Belgian national stadium

16/09/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

A dispute has broken out in Belgium over the language to be used in the new national stadium just one day after agreement was finally reached to build it, Reuters reported at the end of last week.

The planned 60,000 capacity stadium will be the centrepiece of Brussels’ bid to host matches during the 2020 European football championships and replace the current 45,000 seat King Baudouin Stadium (formerly known as the Heysel Stadium).

The venues are only about 1 kilometre apart, but while the King Baudouin Stadium is in Brussels (which is officially bilingual but largely French-speaking), its planned successor is in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders.

Flemish politicians are indignant of Brussels extending its francophone to Flanders. Flemish Sports Minister Philippe Muyters has stated that language rules must be respected.

“One of the underlying elements should be an agreement on the use of Dutch there,” said Muyters on a television programme last Wednesday.

Language is a frequent source of controversy in Belgium. The 6.23 mn. Flemish majority fiercely protects its Dutch language and culture and is constantly alert to encroachments by French speakers, who comprise some 3.32 mn. of the Belgian population.
Made redundant? No, I was ‘catalyzed’

13/09/2013 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.

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 – is the paper now written by greengrocer’s?

07/09/2013 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.
Absent interpreters delay 642 court cases in 2012

05/09/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

The Independent reports today that more than 500 court cases are being thrown out or delayed each week due to failings by prosecutors or in the court system.

Government figures reveal that a total 106,859 cases before crown and magistrates’ courts were dropped or delayed in 2012, costing the public purse an estimated £17.4 mn.

Of this total the absence of an interpreter was responsible for delays to 642 cases in the year in question.

No doubt Helen Grant MP and her colleagues at the Ministry of Justice will attribute these interpreter absences as “teething troubles” with its contract with Capita Translation & Interpreting, rather than a sign of the latter’s total incompetence and yet more evidence that it was wrong to fiddle with the previous arrangements with interpreting services for courts and tribunals in the first place.

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