facepalm

  • The most clueless tweet yet by a politician?

    Steve WoodsPolitics, Social Media, Tech

    Politicians are not renowned for their use of either modern technology or social media. As regards the latter, this was previously noted by tech humour site xkcd with the “Clueless Politician Coast” on the island of Twitter on its Updated Online Communities map in 2010.

    If proof were needed of this cluelessness, this was happily provided today by Maria Miller MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

    screenshot of tweet from Maria Miller MP

    Case proven, m’lud?

    Those with memories capable of coping with more than 140 characters – 138 more than used by Ms Miller – may recall she was the MP who thought it was perfectly in order for taxpayers to provide her parents with somewhere to live.

  • A grammatical error made to last

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities

    I was in London yesterday for an Extraordinary General Meeting of Wikimedia UK, the Wikimedia chapter covering the United Kingdom, held at the British Library.

    It was during my visit that I became aware of the existence of the Crown Estate Paving Commission or CEPC as I walked from Paddington to the library along Marylebone Road. The CEPC is a statutory body first set up by act of Parliament in 1813 to manage and maintain parts Crown land around Regent’s Park and Regent’s Street.

    One the CEPC’s railings fronting Marylebone Road, I came across the sign below.

    image of a brass plate featuring a greengrocer's apostrophe
    A greengrocer’s apostrophe that will last generations

    A brass plate featuring a superfluous or greengrocer’s apostrophe: whoever worded that made up for a lack of education by sheer class. 😉

  • Ministry of Justice is not the Ministry of Fun

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Politics

    An interesting fact emerged today in an article in Inside Time (masthead: the National Newspaper for Prisoners. Ed.) about the mess that Capita Translation & Interpreting’s making of the interpreting contract it has with the Ministry of Justice (posts passim).

    The final paragraph of the Inside Time article mentions last year’s Civil Service People Survey, according to which just 28% of MoJ staff had confidence in their senior management and only 32% said the department was well managed. Moreover, a mere 18% of staff felt changes to services were for the better and only 23% said that change was well managed.

    What was even more surprising to me – and I hope to any other reasonable person – was the response of the MoJ’s spokesperson to these damning verdicts of the Ministry, as follows:

    These results show that staff are growing in confidence in the leadership and management of change in the department.

    What are they putting in the senior management’s and ministers’ tea at 102 Petty France, London SW1? I think we should be told.

    Hat tip: Yelena of Talk Russian

  • Surveillance state: coming to a recycling centre near you?

    Steve WoodsPolitics, Tech

    image of ANPR camera
    ANPR camera, now added to B&NES recycling centres
    Well, it is if you happen to be (un)fortunate enough to live in the unitary authority of Bath & Northeast Somerset (aka B&NES), according to the BBC news website.

    The council has installed ANPR cameras at its 3 recycling centres at Pixash in Keynsham Midland Road in Bath and Old Welton in Radstock to prevent callers from outside the district from using the facilities.

    It has informed residents of the move via its website, as follows:

    From 2 April 2013 you will need a FREE electronic Recycling Centre Resident’s Permit. You will not be able to use any of three our Recycling Centres with out [sic] this.

    According to the council, the move is necessary as it could not afford to subsidise the cost of disposing of waste belonging to people who live elsewhere. The council also states somewhat disingenuously that residents’ council tax pays for them to dispose of their recycling, but somehow omits to state that the council earns income from selling stuff that can be recycled.

    Nevertheless, it is asking its residents to sacrifice their privacy – and hence their liberty – to recycle or dispose of domestic waste.

    Benjamin Franklin had something to say about sacrificing liberty. Writing in 1775, he stated:

    They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

    A loss of liberty to save a few bob on the rates? 🙁 Whatever next?

  • Capita sends unqualified interpreter to Old Bailey

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Politics

    This blog never ceases to be amazed at the mismanagement of the courts and tribunals interpreting service by Capita Translating & Interpreting/ALS (posts passim).

    Under the title ‘Judge corrects a Capita Interpreter’, Linguist Lounge recently published the post by ‘Stranger’ quoted below, which is reposted here with the kind permission of the site administrators.

    At court I fall into conversation with a Capita interpreter. She is North African and does Arabic. Prepared to do French too but only in simple cases. She tells Capita this but still gets sent to do a job at Bailey. The judge was French speaker and, she said, corrected her translation several times. She was greatly embarrassed and told Capita they shouldn’t have sent her. They told her that she should withdraw her name for French in that case. But they knew she wasn’t qualified for French, yet sent her to the court that deals with the most serious criminal matters.

    If you are sending someone to the Bailey you know it is not to interpret for a defendant who has been caught speeding. She says that the admin staff at Capita didn’t have a clue what they were doing. She seemed very unhappy with her “employers”.

    As pointed out by the original author, the Old Bailey doesn’t handle speeding offences. It is better known under its official title of the Central Criminal Court of England and Wales and deals with major criminal cases from Greater London and, in exceptional cases, from other parts of England and Wales. Were I the judge in that case, I would have had Capita Translating & Interpreting charged with contempt of court for not respecting the court’s authority.

  • UK Parliament: no open standards here

    Steve WoodsOpen Standards, Politics, Social Media, Tech

    Did you know House of Commons Select Committees only accept submissions in Microsoft’s proprietary formats?

    Today in my Twitter feed I read a tweet announcing the deadline for submissions to the Transport Select Committee for a new inquiry on local authority parking enforcement.

    Reading through the notes on the submission of written evidence, I was struck by the following:

    2. Evidence should be submitted by e-mail to transev@parliament.uk in Word or Rich Text format, with as little use of colour and images as possible. If you wish to submit written evidence to the Committee in another format you must contact a member of staff to discuss this.

    image of Parliament's crowned portcullis
    Parliament: we’re a Microsoft-only shop.
    Both Word and Rich Text format are Microsoft proprietary file formats. How long they remain readable is totally in the hands of a private American corporation whose first concern is making a return for its shareholders, not preserving the proceedings of Parliament and its committees for the benefit of future generations.

    For those future generations, I’d recommend that parliamentary select committees start accepting submissions in other, non-proprietary formats, such as plain text or open standards such as Open Document Format. The latter is an internationally accepted standard (ISO/IEC 26300:2006/Amd 1:2012) and is being widely adopted by other governments and official bodies (such as NATO, where ODF use is mandatory. Ed.) around the world for official document exchanges.

    Finally, the notes give no details any member of staff for the public to contact for submissions in other formats.

    Update: Since alerting the Transport Select Committee to this post via Twitter, I’ve received the following reply from them:

    Interesting post. We’re happy to accept other formats- and do – as long as we can process them using the software we have. We will certainly pass your points up the Committee Office chain to see if more can be done to accommodate this.

    Thanks, very much folks. I’ll await developments with interest.

  • 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. 🙂

  • Capita now using criminals as court interpreters

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Oddities, Politics

    image of scales of justiceThe rolling disaster that is the Ministry of Justice’s Framework Agreement for court interpreting is a story that just seems to keep on giving, especially in terms of bad news.

    On Friday the Northampton Chronicle carried a report from Northampton Crown Court where the judge branded Capita Translating and Interpreting as “hopelessly incompetent” (posts passim.

    Included in the piece is the following sentence:

    Mirela Watson, an Essex-based Romanian interpreter, said other issues nationally have included a trial collapsing because an under-qualified interpreter failed to interpret properly, and another where a crown court judge recognised an interpreter as a convicted prostitute.

    One is tempted to ask how did the judge know. 😉

  • “Hopelessly incompetent”

    Steve WoodsLanguage, Tech

    At the end of last week, Judge Richard Bray branded Capita “hopelessly incompetent” after he was unable to sentence and expedite deportation proceedings against a Vietnamese drug king because no interpreter arrived at Northampton Crown Court, according to a report in yesterday’s Sunday Express.

    The same report also revealed that Capita Translation and Interpreting, which is making a shambles of providing interpreters for courts and tribunals (posts passim), is using its Capita Polski call centre in Wroclaw, where its 500 Polish staff are meant to match requests for linguists on Capita’s register who are then called or e-mailed with offers of work. However, this is also reported not to be working very well.

    How much longer before the whole Capita/ALS/Ministry of Justice Framework Agreement comes crashing down; and more importantly who’s going to be left to pick up the pieces?

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