language

  • 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.

  • Absent interpreters delay 642 court cases in 2012

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    image of gilded statue of Justice on top of Old BaileyThe 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.

  • Running normally?

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Social Media

    Have you ever wondered why your train is running late?

    The National Rail Enquiries Twitter feed is very useful for providing answers, as per the typical tweet below.

    screenshot of National Rail Enquiries running normally tweet

    I can hear those of you with an acute sense of English already asking whether “running normally” on the UK rail network usually involves “following a broken down train” (because that’s what travelling by rail normally feels like? Ed.). 😉

  • YLAL: interpreting outsourcing a lesson for legal aid changes

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    YLAL logoThere’s a debate on criminal legal aid reforms and price competitive tendering taking place in Westminster Hall on 4 September 2013. The debate has been secured by Labour’s Karl Turner MP and will centre on the Ministry of Justice’s proposed changes to criminal legal aid contained in the consultation paper “Transforming Legal Aid: Delivering a More Credible and Efficient System”.

    Ahead of the debate, Young Legal Aid Lawyers (YLAL), a 2,000-strong group of lawyers committed to practising in areas of law traditionally funded by legal aid, has very helpfully prepared a briefing note (PDF) ahead of this debate.

    The briefing note is not very complementary about the MoJ’s experience with the outsourcing of interpreting services for courts and tribunals to ALS/Capita T&I (posts passim) and makes the following point about this ongoing fiasco.

    Short term “savings” cannot justify the long term cost to the justice system, one which Mr Grayling is correct to describe as “a justice system of which we can be proud and which justly deserves its world-wide recognition for impartiality and fairness”. We should learn the lessons of outsourcing to the lowest bidder and how this leads to the state picking up the tab when providers fail to deliver, for example, the contracting of interpreting services for the court and tribunal system.

    What’s the betting Justice Minister ‘Failing’ Grayling – the first non-lawyer to be appointed Lord Chancellor since 1673 – completely ignores all advice and pushes ahead regardless with his disastrous plans?

  • 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.

  • 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. 😉

  • Capita: feast or famine

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics, Social Media

    So far this blog has recorded a dearth of Capita T&I interpreters for the jobs they’re supposed to be doing in the country’s courts (posts passim).

    Now just for a change we’re pleased to report a surfeit, as shown in this tweet (screenshot below).

    Tweet screenshot

    Are Capita T&I interpreters like buses – one waits for ages and then 3 turn up at once? Or do Capita’s finest believe in safety in numbers? Is any comment on this amazing development forthcoming from Helen Grant MP, the Minister for Victims and the Courts?

    I think we should be told.

  • Replacement interpreter has to leave after 30 minutes

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    Reposted from RPSI Linguist Lounge.

    Barbara Hecht writes:

    I represented a 52 year-old woman of good character needing an interpreter, first appearance 10 am start – she was in virtual court so she was in the police station. The interpreter was there early and promptly (and spoke the language required well) but…there was a part heard trial in another court where no interpreter had been arranged. So they took my interpreter, and my woman in the police station who had already been there from 6 pm the night before had to wait.

    When I raised this with the trial DJ and said she was diabetic, she took the view that she could wait a bit because the police would look after her and carried on hearing submissions a bit longer in the part heard trial. A replacement interpreter was booked to come at 1.45 pm. When I found the replacement interpreter at 2.15 pm because the matter was put back to 2.30, he said he had to go!

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