Daily Archives: Wednesday, March 20, 2013

  • Budget shocker: “one pence”

    Steve WoodsPolitics, Social Media, Tech

    Gidiot Osborne looking smarmyToday was a momentous day for George Gideon Oliver Osborne (aged 41 and three-quarters), a man who does Chancellor of the Exchequer impressions. Firstly, he joined Twitter. Needless to say, there was the usual warm Twitter welcome for politicians, as evidenced by the use of the hashtag #gidiot. Those using the hashtag were slightly more polite than other reactions to George’s embracing of Twitter.

    Secondly, it was also the day of the Budget. In summary there was very little to cheer about, except the abolition of the beer duty escalator.

    However, what made me cringe while listening to the Chancellor’s speech live on radio (apart from his whining, grating tone. Ed.) was his language: at one point near the end, I distinctly heard him refer to the amount of “one pence“.

    Now, George isn’t exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, but one would at least expect the Chancellor of the Exchequer to know the difference between penny and pence.

    Since the end of the budget speech itself, BBC Radio 4 news readers have also reiterated Osborne’s ‘one pence’ blunder – repeatedly. 🙁

  • Confused by translators and interpreters? You too can write for the Post!

    Steve WoodsBristol, Language

    To paraphrase the Duke of Edinburgh’s famous retort from 1962, the Bristol Post is a bloody awful newspaper. Every day it manages to show its ignorance of the districts of Bristol, greengrocer’s apostrophes are not unknown and the command of terminology shown by its journalists is abysmal.

    As regards the latter, there was a prime example in this article about cannabis farms, as follows:

    Gardeners often appear in court with a translator and cases regularly detail how electricity at the grow houses is bypassed from the mains.

    In court with a translator? My heart sank. The writer has clearly not been following this blog or other sources about the interpreting fiasco in the English courts (posts passim). Moreover, he has clearly never read my early post on the BBC’s never-ending confusion of interpreters with translators.

    For the benefit of passing Post journalists, I shall once again quote from that article about the difference between the two:

    …here’s a brief explanation of the difference between interpreting and translation: interpreting deals with the spoken word, translation with the written word.

    Simple isn’t it? So simple on would think even a Bristol Post hack would be able to understand the difference. 🙂