March | 2013 | Steve Woods

Man City’s Tévez falls foul of court interpreting disaster

08/03/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

Carlos Tévez, another of Capita TI’s latest victims
Could Carlos Tévez, Manchester City FC’s Argentine forward, be the highest profile victim yet of the court interpreting disaster (posts passim) presided over by Capita Translating and Interpreting/ALS?

According to a report in today’s Daily Mail, Tévez “was bailed because there was no interpreter at Macclesfield Police Station. He is to return there on Tuesday.”

Cheshire Police have a contract with Capita Translating and Interpreting for the provision of interpreters.

Tévez was banned from driving for 6 months on 16th January for failing to respond to police letters and was arrested on suspicion of driving while disqualified last Thursday near his home in Alderley Edge, Cheshire.

If I were the man in black blowing the whistle, I’d given Capita Translating and Interpreting a red card and send them off the pitch for an early bath. 😉

Hat tip: Linguist Lounge
LibreOffice 4.0.1 released

07/03/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Tech

Yesterday The Document Foundation blog announced the release of LibreOffice 4.0.1 for Linux, MacOS and Windows. This follows the release of LibreOffice 4.0 at the start of last month (posts passim).

LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

The Document Foundation describes the new release is a step forward in the process of improving the overall quality and stability of LibreOffice 4.0. However, for business use The Document Foundation suggests the more solid and stable LibreOffice 3.6.5.

Nearly 100 bugs have been fixed in the 4.0.1 release, according to the release notes.

The Foundation’s Documentation team has also released a “Getting Started with LibreOffice 4.0” guide. This is available in PDF and ODF formats from the LibreOffice website and as a printed book from Lulu.

LibreOffice 4.0.1 can be downloaded from the LibreOffice website, whilst extensions for LibreOffice are available from the extension repository.

Now available from Google Play
In addition, the release has been announced of LibreOffice Impress Remote (posts passim), which will allow users to control Impress presentations from an Android smartphone. LibreOffice Impress remote is now available free of charge from Google Play for all platforms – Linux, MacOS and Windows, whilst instructions for its use can be found on the Document Foundation wiki.
Criminal Bar Association Chair condemns court interpreting shambles

05/03/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

It’s not just interpreters that are dismayed at the shambles that has been the outsourcing of court interpreting services (posts passim). Barristers are now beginning to show their frustration too.

Below is the transcript of an interview given by Michael Turner QC, Chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, to BBC 3 Counties Radio on 27th February 2013.

This Government and the last have been obsessed by outsourcing publicly funded work.

The problem with the present interpreter service which was started off by Applied Language Solutions (ALS) and is now Capita is that interpreters don’t turn up or when they do turn up they don’t speak the right language or they don’t speak English. It’s a con on the tax payer and a con on the victims of crime.

It costs at a very conservative estimate £110 a minute to run a court room with a jury and so you imagine if an interpreter doesn’t turn up for half a day or an hour, what the on cost of that really is for the tax payer and that is what is happening.

They often don’t speak the language of the defendant, or if they do they can’t speak English, so we can’t understand them.

What happens when you outsource to the private sector is that the private sector is desperate to make a profit and therefore it pays absolutely appalling wages. If you want proper interpreting services these are professional people and you have to pay them properly. It is as simple as that.

Lawyers see this on a daily basis. It is just not providing proper savings for the tax payer. This is country wide.

What the Government has not done is properly assess whether this is a true saving to the tax payer.

If you have an interpretation service which doesn’t actually provide the proper interpreters and that causes a delay in the court system, the victim of crime is let down, because the victim’s case can’t get on and it can’t be tried.

As soon as you have got a court which is not sitting and is delayed you are costing the tax payer £110 per minute for that service. That £15 million which the Government pretends it has saved is replicated 10 times over on another balance sheet which the tax payer never sees.

We have been screaming at the Government about this and we are yet to see whether it pays any dividends but the tax payer should know they are not getting value for money.

The Justice Minister is not at the coal face and I and my members are and you can’t rely on those assurances of £15 million savings.

Mr Turner has given his permission for these comments to be published widely.
81% of court interpreters boycott Capita register

04/03/2013 Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

A survey commissioned by umbrella group Professional Interpreters for Justice (PI4J) has revealed that four in five interpreters (81%) are still refusing to join the private register operated by Capita for interpreting jobs in courts and other parts of the justice system, even though the contract has been in operation for over one year.

The group will now share the new survey findings with Justice Minister Helen Grant MP (I bet she ignores them! Ed.) as she considers her response to the recent Justice Committee report (6th February), which described the Ministry’s handling of the court interpreting contract as ‘nothing short of shambolic’ and said it ‘failed to heed warnings from the professionals concerned’ (posts passim).

Meanwhile Michael Turner QC, the Chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, speaking in an interview with BBC 3 Counties Radio, said the contract with Capita is ‘a con on the taxpayer and a con on the victims of crime’.

A succession of six-monthly online surveys since August 2011 have consistently shown 80%-90% of qualified and experienced freelance interpreters refusing to work under the new system because professional standards have been lowered by the private contractor and the interests of justice are not being served.

Madeleine Lee of the Professional Interpreters Alliance, one of 10 organisations comprising Professional Interpreters for Justice, said: “We can’t call a strike because we are freelancers. Nonetheless the strength of feelings has been borne out and the majority are not willing to work for Capita. It’s very clear that after one year it’s not simply a matter of pay, it’s a matter of principles, standards and quality – we don’t want to be lumped in with others who are not as qualified as we are”.

A total of 859 interpreters completed the online survey between 29 January and 10 February 2013 with the results showing that the calls to review the Framework Agreement and the Capita contract are still supported by the majority of those in the profession.

Keith Moffitt, Chair of the Chartered Institute of Linguists, also part of PI4J, said: “The survey findings are strong evidence for the Ministry of Justice that interpreters cannot be persuaded to work under the Framework Agreement or the Capita contract. The dissatisfaction of interpreters who haven’t registered to work was echoed by those who have in fact signed up for jobs with Capita TI, who said they were not happy with the pay and conditions offered and felt mistreated.”

58% of those refusing to register with Capita stated they have been telephoned directly by Court clerks in the last 3 months with urgent requests for them to attend court because Capita has let them down.

Geoffrey Buckingham, Chair of the Association of Police and Court Interpreters (ACPI), said: “We will be discussing with the Justice Minister that there have not been the marked improvements to the service which she believes are happening. How can there be when over half of the respondents to our survey who refuse to sign up with Capita say they are being contacted by courts desperate to get them to work? There have been continual breaches and no published statistics by the Ministry of Justice since August 2012. Those which were published last year are unaudited. The surveys we have commissioned are the only insights into what is happening and how interpreters feel and any attempts to persuade them to work under the Framework Agreement are bound to fail”.

The Ministry of Justice has been repeatedly criticised, most recently by the Justice Committee, for signing a four year Framework Agreement for language services with Applied Language Solutions (ALS) which was acquired by Capita in December 2011 and now operates as Capita Translation and Interpreting.

Incidences of interpreter ‘no-shows’ and poor quality interpreting at courts and police stations across the UK are still being reported at an alarming rate. For example, on 7th February at Snaresbrook Crown Court a case collapsed due to disputed interpreting by a Sylheti (Bangladeshi) linguist, resulting in Judge Joana Korner CMG QC specifically instructing the Crown Prosecution Service not to “hire any interpreters in future who are not on the National Register”.

Professional Interpreters for Justice (PI4J) have rejected Justice Minister Helen Grant MP’s publicly stated figures on the performance of Capita TI. On 16 January, in a written answer to Shadow Justice Minister Sadiq Khan, she said there was an “increasing improvement in service to 93.5% performance by August 2012” (I think I smell burning knickers. Ed.).
LibreUmbria’s 5 good reasons to switch to LibreOffice

04/03/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Tech
The LibreUmbria blog features a new post today entitled (in English) 5+5 good reasons to adopt LibreOffice. The 10 reasons themselves are split between those for end users (PDF, Italian) and administrators and managers (PDF, Italian).

LibreOffice for all your office suite needs: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, database, drawing and formulas

The post also features a fine graphic setting out 5 of the reasons. These are:
- Quality. When using Office, you will happen to notice that the 2000 version is being officially dropped. This is because there is a new licence to acquire for each update for commercial software. LibreOffice is a product being continuously improved because it is the users who ask the developer community to fix bugs and add and simplify its features. LibreOffice is a product that shall never run out.
- Freedom. LibreOffice is free software not linked to any company in particular. It can be freely used without limits and conditions imposed by user licences. You can install LibreOffice on your home computers, you can give to a friend and download it free of charge from the internet.
- Training. Switching to LibreOffice means being able to take a training course which will teach you all the functions you need to know about.
- Open format. With LibreOffice we use an open format (.odt) instead of .doc. You’ve surely never thought of it, but open formats ensure accessibility in the long term, but above all ensure transparency of the data exchanged; distributing content different from that which you seen on the screen will never happen with .odt.
- Help. When you start working with LibreOffice you can always count on help from a colleague, as well as its large developer community, research centres and companies ready to fix any bugs in the working of the software.
As previously reported, Italy’s Umbria region has a project to migrate 5,000 public sector workers from MS Office to LibreOffice (posts passim).
“One tombstone….4s”

03/03/2013 Steve WoodsBristol

I’m currently reading Charles Wells’ ‘A short history of the port of Bristol’, published in 1909 and available free of charge online from the Internet Archive.

Apart from the changes in the course of the Bristol Avon, what particularly interested me was the story of the development of the early port up until the completion of the Floating Harbour in 1809.

What intrigued me in particular was a very brief passage in Wells’ first chapter relating to the 16th century, as follows:

St Stephen’s, Bristol, 16th century purveyor of cheap repair materials.

As the centuries passed nothing seems to have been done to further improve the facilities of the port, and many merchants were content with their own private landing-stages on the banks of the tidal Avon. There is, however, now and then a mention of repairs to the Quay in the Corporation records. In November, 1577, for example, is this entry in the audit book: “Paid the churchwardens of St Stephen’s for one tombstone for the Quay wall, 4s.”

The tombstone intrigued me: I’ve long observed that old tombstones are often used for paving on church property. However, this is the first time I’ve seen their use for other purposes off church property recorded. Was the actual tombstone new and unused? If an old one, had the family whose grave it marked long died out? If used, did it still have an inscription? How many tombstones ended up in the walls of the city docks and the paving of the quay over the centuries?

Historians of Bristol are invited to leave possible answers below.
Open letter against Iceland’s proposed internet porn ban

01/03/2013 Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

Yesterday a group of forty security, privacy and human rights advocates and organizations from 19 countries, including Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, Palestine, Argentina, Peru, Guatemala, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Jordan and the United States, released an open letter to Ögmundur Jónasson, Iceland’s Minister of the Interior, regarding the ongoing discussions on the possibility of establishing internet pornography censorship in Iceland.

The text of the open letter is reproduced in full below.

Ögmundur Jónasson
Innanríkisráðuneytið
Sölvhólsgötu
Reykjavík

Re: Open Letter to Ögmundur Jónasson, Icelandic Minister of Interior, regarding Internet censorship

Dear Mr. Jónasson,

As security, privacy and human rights advocates and organizations from around the world, we are writing to express our deep concern with your current proposals to attempt to restrict Internet access in Iceland to pornographic content.

Iceland is a liberal democratic state which should not serve as a role model for Internet censorship. Regimes, totalitarian and democratic alike, can use these proposals as an example in order to justify censorship of the Internet, practiced or proposed. It has already jeopardized longstanding efforts to prevent or abolish censorship in totalitarian regimes and protect civil liberties and human rights worldwide.

The current discussion of blocking pornographic content has offered no definition, no evidence, and suggested no technology. This is an affront to basic principles of the society, and while we acknowledge that this discussion is at a starting point, we feel that the way it is being conducted is harmful.

Traditionally, censorship has involved preventing publication and persecution of people with unpopular opinions. On the Internet, censorship has taken a new guise. It doesn’t merely prevent publication, but also restricts people’s access to the information they seek. Rather than silencing a voice, the result is depriving the population of material they can see and read. This is censorship, as it skews the way people see the world. It is tempting to regard filtering the internet as a quick and easy way to restrict unwanted speech, opinions, or media, which the government regards as harmful for either them or the people. The right to see the world as it is, is critical to the very tenets and functions of a democracy and must be protected at all costs.

It is technically impossible to censor content delivered over the Internet without monitoring all telecommunications. Not just unwanted communications or inappropriate material, everything must be examined automatically by unsupervised machines which make the final decision on whether to allow the content to continue or not. This level of government surveillance directly conflicts with the idea of a free society.

Internet censorship is used by totalitarian regimes in order to restrict people’s access to various information and material on the internet. The methods used to conduct this censorship are technically identical to the methods that would be employed by Iceland if these plans were to be implemented. The act of censoring pornography in Iceland differs in no way from repression of speech in Iran, China or North Korea. By stating that Iceland is considering censoring pornographic material on the Internet for moral reasons, they are justifying rather than condemning the actions of totalitarian regimes.

The internet is not the source of violence, it is merely a medium by which violence is made apparent. If the government of Iceland is genuinely concerned about the wellbeing of victims of violence, there are many more effective ways. The prohibition of pornographic content may create demand for an underground porn industry, unregulated and most certainly affiliated with other illegal activities, as we have seen in the case of drugs or alcohol prohibition. Hiding the problem is not a solution and may in fact make things worse.

If the Icelandic Government worries about children getting their sexual education from pornography on the Internet, the solution should be better sex education in the home or through schools. Sex education that deals not only with conception, contraception and sexually transmitted diseases, but also relationships, communication and respect.

There exist decentralized technical measures that respect the rights and dignity of all citizens in a society which involves aiding families with providing an accessible way to make their own computer and internet access secure for their children, but technically speaking, it would still be possible to go around the blockage.

Over the last years, Iceland has been regarded by the international community as a shining example of a free, democratic society. Iceland has positioned itself as a model democratic state in global context when dealing with freedom of the press, the open process of drafting a new constitution, and open review of information regulation. Therefore, we implore you to reject censorship as a viable option and seek more effective means of improving society, both in Iceland and abroad.

Kind regards,
Renata Avila Pinto, Human Rights Lawyer (Guatemala)
Jillian C. York, Director for International Freedom of Expression, Electronic Frontier Foundation (USA)
Kim Pham, Principal, Expression Tech (USA)
Sjón, Author, President of Icelandic PEN (Iceland)
Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT (USA)
Richard Stallman, President, Free Software Foundation (USA)
Mina Naguib, Human rights activist (Egypt)
Katarzyna Szymielewicz, Panoptykon Foundation (Poland)
Trevor Timm, Freedom of the Press Foundation (USA)
Michał “rysiek” Woźniak, President, Fundacja Wolnego i Otwartego Oprogramowania (Poland)
Ásta Guðrún Helgadóttir, Free speech activist (Iceland)
Stefan Marsiske, Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge (Hungary)
Beatriz Busaniche, Vía Libre Foundation (Argentina)
Walter van Holst, Vrijschrift (Netherlands)
Atanas Tchobanov, Balkanleaks (Bulgaria)
Mazen Maarouf, Writer (Palestine)
Aðalheiður Ámundadóttir, Lawyer (Iceland)
Douwe Korff, Foundation for Information Policy Research (United Kingdom)
Arjen Kamphuis, Chairman, Open Source Working Group, Internet Society (Netherlands)
James Vasile, Director, New America Foundation Open Internet Tools Project (USA)
Timo Karjalainen, President, Electronic Frontier Finland (Finland)
Ot van Daalen, Director, Bits of Freedom (Netherlands)
Aleksander Waszkielewicz, President of the Board, Fundacja Instytut Rozwoju Regionalnego (Poland)
Guðjón Már Guðjónsson, Internet Policy Institute (Iceland)
Margot Kaminski, Executive Director of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School (USA)
Smári McCarthy, Executive Director, International Modern Media Institute (Iceland)
Laurie Penny, author and journalist (United Kingdom)
Sunil Abraham, Executive Director Center for Internet and Society (India)
Thomas Hughes, Managing Director, Media Frontiers (Denmark)
Miguel Morachimo, Hiperderecho (Peru)
Annie Machon, former MI5 intelligence officer and civil liberties campaigner (United Kingdom)
Daniela Bozhinova, Bulgarian Association for the Promotion of Citizens Initiative (Bulgaria)
Dariusz Grzesista, Chairman, Polish Linux Users’ Group (Poland)
Mohammed Tarakiyee, Jordan Open Source (Jordan)
Józef Halbersztadt, Internet Society Poland (Poland)
Zineb Belmkaddem, Free speech activist (Morocco)
Rafik Dammak, Free speech activist (Tunisia)
Oktavía Jónsdóttir, Executive Director, Human Link Network (Denmark)
Josef Irnberger, Initiative für Netzfreiheit (Austria)
Markus Beckedahl, Digitale Geschel schaft (Germany)
Alek Tarkowski, Director, Centrum Cyfrowe Projekt: Polska (Poland)
Hugleikur Dagsson, Artist (Iceland)
Latvia’s economy ministry should boost use of open standards and open technology

01/03/2013 Steve WoodsOpen Source, Open Standards, Politics, Tech

According to a report on Joinup, the EU’s public sector open source news site, LATA – Latvian Open Technology Association – is calling on the Ministry of Economy to make open standards and open technologies one of the core themes of the ministry’s business education efforts. LATA published a statement (Latvian) on Wednesday, pleading continued funding of ICT training for Latvian companies. Earlier this week the ministry announced a four-fold reduction in the training budget.

“Businesses get the maximum effect from the right skills to use open technologies and open standards.” LATA argues that open technologies and standards make companies more efficient, as well as improving interoperability.

Latvia’s Ministry of Economy is currently preparing its 2014-2020 plans for using European Social Fund monies. It has announced that it intends to reduce the ICT training budget to 5.25 mn. lats (about €7.51 mn.) and to restrict funding to SMEs. Between 2007 and 2013, over 20 mn. lats (about €29 mn.) was available in employee training grants.

According to LATA, many Latvian ICT companies are using European funding to improve ICT skills and gain knowledge of new technologies.

Posts navigation