Throughout my professional life, writing so that one’s meaning is clear and there is no room for misinterpretation has been of paramount importance.
However, writing without ambiguity is a skill that’s evidently bypassed those who currently write the news headlines for Yahoo’s UK website…
Enquiries are continuing as to how the cops came to be in the woman’s pyjamas in the first place. 😀
The Bristol Post, the city’s newspaper of (warped) record, hasn’t had and doesn’t have a reputation for accuracy in reporting – a situation which has not improved since it and all the other Local World regional newspaper titles were taken over by Trinity Mirror.
This is more than evident in the title’s reporting of politics today.
The last (New) Labour government had a reputation for authoritarianism and what can best be described as “control-freakery“, so it is no surprise to see the Post assigning the comrades an authoritarian and control freak role amongst today’s headlines.
Mind how you go now! 😉
Furthermore, for the sake of balance and impartiality, the Post also includes some news of the Conservatives, as per the following screenshot.
At this point, a small history lesson might be in order.
The nickname of the Conservative and Unionist Party – to give them their full name – is the Tory Party.
As a piece of English vocabulary, Tory has interesting origins. Etymologically, it’s derived from the Middle Irish word tóraidhe, which equates in modern Irish to tóraà and to tòraidh in modern Scottish Gaelic. It has the meaning of outlaw, robber or brigand, from the Irish word tóir, meaning “pursuit”, since outlaws were “pursued men”.
It appears that since the term was coined, the Conservatives’ outlawry has expanded to encompass vandalism and careless driving. 😀
If more classes of crime can be ascribed to the party, please mention them in the comments below.
Update: as of this afternoon, one of these howlers has been corrected by the residents of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth. However, the Conservative Party are still responsible on the Post website for robbery and mayhem. 🙂
Standards of English in the media continue to plumb new depths as per the tweet below.
Why a crocodile would want to impress a British backpacker is unclear. In the immortal words of Private Eye, I think we should be told. 😀
Hat tip: Harriet Johnson.
In Hamilton, New Zealand, mayoral candidate James Casson’s bid to appeal to Maori voters went terribly wrong, NZ news site Stuff reports.
Why?
Mr. Casson used Google Translate to get his message across in te reo Maori.
As a consequence, his election address dropped through the letterboxes of Maori voters made an impact for all the wrong reasons, with the unintelligible jumble of words and phrases being described by Waikato University language expert Tom Roa as “very, very, very poor“.
Another Waikato University lecturer, Te Taka Keegan, who teaches computer science and worked on Google Translate remarked: “The gibberish that is written in the second part of this bio is barely recognisable as te reo Maori, it is disrespectful to the Maori language.”
When queried, Mr. Casson said he was unaware of how his profile was translated, stating that he gave his English version to a “Maori woman” at his office to get it done.
Stuff carried out its own test, copying Casson’s English language text into Google Translate and receiving in return “a word-for-word, error-ridden version of the official Hamilton City Council“, missing prepositions, articles and connecting words.
According to Newshub, another New Zealand news site, a translation back into English of Mr. Casson’s botched Maori translation reads as follows:
Work James 26 years inside New Zealand Police, before officer Charge of Northland, Hamilton community Police centre Flagstaff.
Work overseas like a peace keeper in Bougainville, Papua new Guinea, Tonga, Solomon Islands, Timor to the United Nations.
Return the good community, work the people work to safe. James worked for Police to build safe Hamilton for you.
Straight ahead [the text then seems to be another Pacific language]. faitotonu mo e angatonu aia takitahi. KORE ki Mita Water, paying Rate for dinner Council/feast for councillors using a free Corporate Box at Stadium Waikato or by councillors.
Free waka on some of the adds being used of Auckland.
Working towards finishing vagrants in Auckland.
Resources HCC maintenence, paddlers trying to hold into a beautiful looking Hamilton.
The moral of this story is that if you want a decent translation, you’re still better of with a human being than machine translation and this is likely to be the case for many years to come.
Modern British society seems obsessed with celebrity culture: this is no more evident than in the mainstream media; and such is true of Bristol’s (news)paper of (warped) record, the Bristol Post.
It would appear that no sooner does a Z-list non-entity have something to do with the city than the illiterati that constitute the current reporting staff of the Temple Way Ministry of Truth than they are lost for words – or for le mot juste at the very least.
This is evident in a puff piece in today’s online edition featuring some nobody off some dire TV talent show, as per the obligatory screenshot below.
So Bristol Post, is a nobody off the telly looking intently at a show at the Hippodrome or taking part in it? In the immortal words of Private Eye, I think we should be told.
For local news Bath, Bristol’s near neighbour, is served by the Bath Chronicle. Like the Bristol Post, the Chronicle is part of the Local World group and shares its close neighbour’s reputation for (lack of) accuracy.
Today’s Bath Chronicle carried an exclusive, but readers had to read the caption under the photograph accompanying the report to realise it.
Bath Spa railway station used to look as shown in the photograph below.
Close observation of today’s Bath Chronicle report, especially the photo caption, reveals there is no nowhere for InterCity 125s or any other passenger rolling stock to stop where Bath Spa station once stood.
For the life of me I cannot understand why the Chronicle ignored the disappearance of a major piece of transport infrastructure and had its piece concentrate on delays to train services between the West of England and London Paddington. 😉
The image below of part of a menu originates from Australia and comes courtesy of Twitter.
Before I reply and choose my starter, can anyone tell if the child is a) organic and b) free range? 😉
A strange phenomenon is occurring in Bristol: people not playing football is resulting in the closure of bank branches in the city.
The source of this curious news is the ever (un)reliable Bristol Post, which yesterday carried a story headlined: “Two HSBC banks to shut in Bristol following slump in customers“.
The relevant section is shown in the following screenshot*.
Either football is vital to the survival of HSBC bank branches or there’s a typographical error in the third sentence.
To help readers decide which of the two above alternatives is correct, your correspondent has not noticed that the floors of HSBC bank branches are marked out with white lines to resemble football pitches.
As a final thought and a bit of idle speculation, are more errors creeping in to news reports appearing online due to modern “journalists” working with predictive text options switched on?
* = The article’s copy has since been amended with “footfall” replacing “football” in the third paragraph.
A translation error wrongly mentioning “alcohol” in the Arabic list of ingredients resulted in Dubai Municipality recalling Milka Oreo chocolate bars last Thursday, Gulf News reports.
Dubai’s Food Safety Department said the recall followed rumours in social media that these chocolate bars contain alcohol.
A spokesman told Gulf News the following:
We received the rumour for clarification through our WhatsApp service and we checked the product. Samples were tested and we found that there is no alcohol in the product. But the problem was a wrong translation of the product label.
The wrongly translated ingredient was chocolate liquor, i.e. semi-solid cocoa paste, the second element of which – liquor- the translator had wrongly translated “alcoholic beverages”.
The Food Safety Department also contacted the manufacturer to correct the error and gave reassurances that the bar were halal and therefore safe for consumption by Muslims.
