Not lost in translation…
Because it was never translated in the first place!
No further comment necessary.
Hat tip: Kit Wallace
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The client’s instructions faithfully implemented? -
Bristol Post Balls – ungulate identification
Horses and cattle are both ungulates, i.e. both use the tips of their toes to support their whole body weight whilst moving. Both cows and horses have hooves.
A horse is an odd-toed ungulate with a long hairy mane and tale, whilst a cow is an even-toed ungulate. They’re easy to identify, unless you’re a city-based employee of the Bristol Post.
Yesterday the Post published a tragic story of more than 100 horses having to be put down after being rescued from appalling conditions in Bridgend in the Vale of Glamorgan.
However, the picture used to illustrate the report features animals that look more bovine than equine, as revealed by the screenshot below.
Frisians or Dobbins? Just because both beef and horsemeat taste equally good on the plate doesn’t means they are interchangeable in the field, Bristol Post. Try saddling up a cow and entering a steeplechase! 🙂
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Bristol Post Balls – bedding expenses
I knew having children was expensive, but never realised cots – those small-sized beds for babies – could cost so much until I read this article in today’s Bristol Post about an expensive night out which sadly ended up in that local Palais de Justice also known as Bristol Crown Court.
Bristol Crown Court Apparently, the night out resulted in a huge bill for bedding, according to the relevant sentence in the article.
The court was told Collins had to stump up £8,500 towards legal cots.
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Face recognition advertising – sign the petition
News broke yesterday that supermarket giant Tesco is set to install hi-tech screens that scan customers’ faces in petrol stations so that they can be fed targeted advertising. The screens will be provided by Amscreen, whose chief executive seems to think that implementing a system like “something out of Minority Report“, the dystopian science fiction film, is something of which to be proud. ( Here’s a hint for Alan Sugar’s son: that’s like recommending Nineteen Eighty-Four as a blueprint for running the United Kingdom. Ed.)
It isn’t. What is being proposed is a gross intrusion of privacy and an affront to dignity.
Naturally, this has caused a storm of outrage on social media.
Every little helps? However, it’s not just Tesco that’s planning this. Some parts of the UK’s healthcare sector are also planning to implement it.
Fortunately, someone with some gumption and a great regard for their own and others’ privacy has set up a petition on the government’s e-petition website. The petition reads as follows:
Face recognition software is about to be used to see what adverts you are looking at. It recognises your gender, age and will be used in GP surgeries, hospitals, dentists whilst you wait for your appointment and other public areas. This is a complete invasion of privacy.
Finally, let’s not forget how George Orwell described advertising in 1936 in Keep the Aspidistra Flying:
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.
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Bristol Post Balls – News in Brief
Most newspapers have brief items of news (posts passim).
However, they don’t come much briefer than this one.
As usual a screenshot is provided, just in case someone down the Temple Way Ministry of Truth decides to edit it after this post is published!
Within a few hours, the above post attracted the following apposite comment:
That’s one of the better written stories I’ve seen on this site.
Quite! 🙂
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Bristol Post Balls – an embarrassing vowel movement in public
There’s hardly a day goes by without the Bristol Post screwing up somewhere.Today it features a glowing review of veteran US three part vocal harmony and guitar group Crosby, Stills & Nash.
However, at one point the language is not so much glowing as glaringly wrong when Mr Harnell trips over a near homophone:
Despite hoovering up the Gross National Product of Columbia in his darkest days, David Crosby’s voice remains a thing of wonder.
Columbia? The female personification of the United States of America?
I think the reviewer had got his vowels muddled and actually meant Colombia, a South American country famous for the supply of a variety of white nasal decongestant allegedly enjoyed at one time by Mr Crosby.
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Bristol Post Balls – picture this
“Knicker thief spared prison after being caught in house” is an appropriate headline for a story of lingerie larceny.
Nevertheless, I wonder if the article’s accompanying photograph is the right one.
Have Avon & Somerset Constabulary started kitting out their finest like combatants in the English Civil War?
I think we should be told.
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Bristol Post Balls – what funs!
Every story needs a good, pertinent and accurate headline, as shown by this item in the news section of today’s online edition of the Bristol Post.
The headline has been corrected since the above screenshot was taken at 8.00 am.
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Guardian latest media outlet to confuse translators and interpreters
The Guardian, immortalised in Private Eye as The Grauniad for its error-prone typographical propensities, now reveals its errors are not restricted to orthography.
The home page of today’s online edition has a link to an item on machine translation and online translation tools. The perils of machine translation is a topic which has also featured on this blog (posts passim).
However, the link to the report is illustrated by an image depicting interpreters at work, as the following screenshot shows.
This means The Guardian is now the latest media outlet in the UK willing to employ illiterates who can’t tell interpreters from translators along with the likes of the BBC (posts passim) and the Bristol Post (posts passim).
This blog has a handy illustrated guide on the difference between these two sorts of linguists should employees of any of the above organisations need enlightenment.
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Bristol Post Balls – spelling it out
Thursday saw the launch of the latest Apple iPhone models – the 5C and 5S – when scores of people with more money than sense queued overnight to make an elitist US technology company even richer.
Naturally the Bristol Post covered it in Friday’s edition as there’s an Apple shop in Bristol’s monument to Mammon otherwise known as Cabot Circus.
Part of the Post’s coverage consisted of a photo gallery, which featured as follows in its news section.
How does one spell queue? Certainly not how the Post has done.
This crime against orthography is also perpetuated on the gallery page itself.