Daily Archives: Sunday, December 1, 2013

  • The Eye looks at court interpreting

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Media, Politics

    The Ministry of Justice’s latest quarterly statistical bulletin on the use of language services in courts and tribunals (PDF), which was covered by this blog two weeks ago (posts passim), has also caught the attention of the latest issue of Private Eye.

    Describing it as “the shoddy foreign language interpreter service provided by Crapita“, The Eye’s piece notes there’s a greater than one in ten chance of trouble when a court makes a booking for an interpreter via the MoJ’s contract with Capita, with the piece reaching the conclusion why bother with the contract at all?

    Quite.

    Below is a scan on The Eye’s article.

    image of scanned Private Eye article

  • Bristol Post Balls – tall tales

    Steve WoodsBristol, Media

    image of Bristol's Castlemead building
    Bristol’s tallest building according to the Post
    Yesterday the Bristol Post published a story of a wrecking spree that took place at the Castlemead building in central Bristol.

    Castlemead was completed in 1981. The building has a roof height of 80 metres (262 feet) and consists of 18 floors. Written by an unidentified journalist, the Bristol Post article confidently describes it in its first paragraph as “Bristol’s tallest building”.

    But is it?

    No.

    Most definitely not.

    image of St Mary Redcliffe
    Bristol’s actual tallest building
    As this blog has pointed out before (posts passim), that accolade is held by a much older building – St Mary Redcliffe, parts of which date to the 12th century.

    The spire of St Mary Redcliffe, is 89 metres (292 feet) high. Its height makes it the third tallest English church spire in England. The spire itself was struck by lightning in 1446 and truncated (something which can be clearly seen in the illustration of the church on Millerd’s 17th century plan of Bristol. Ed.), in which condition it remained for some 400 years before being rebuilt to its present height in 1872.

    So, Bristol Post hacks, think carefully – and do the all-important background research and fact checking – before in future describing any modern edifice as Bristol’s tallest. 🙂