The Times reports that there is a disastrous lack of competent translators who are native speakers of English.

A lot of Marie Woolf’s article is based on unpublished materials, internal memos and so on. It seems a little bit souped up, although I am sure there is a shortage.

Monty Python could have made something of this:

Potential recruits are being given remedial coaching to bring their abilities up to standard, while a Eurocrat has been dispatched to scour Britain full-time for anyone who can speak foreign languages well, and to encourage schoolchildren to study them.

I wonder if this Eurocrat is in disguise, like a restaurant critic, and how he susses out these secret linguists.

One would like to know more about the following:

Internal commission memos show the standard of Britons who apply to be European Union translators is so dismal that Brussels is taking emergency steps to fill the linguistic gap, including posting recruitment ads on YouTube, the video-sharing website.

While other countries have pass rates regularly nearing 100% of those who take EU translation tests, as few as 20% of British applicants pass.

I did find a table dated May 2007 showing which international institutions seek what interpreters and translators. It’s a Word document – here is the html version. Here is the top level of IAMLADP.

LATER NOTE: Philippa at Blogging Translator points out that the EU is not likely to accept translators without experience, and many UK translators may apply straight after finishing a course (albeit this is true of those in other countries too).

EVEN LATER NOTE: Sarah Dillon also reported this article, as did Percy Balemans. See Sarah’s comment at Philippa’s blog, linked above. She grew up in Ireland and writes:

But then I’m probably biased: my formative language-learning years were set to an extremely pro-European backdrop and I know for sure that I wouldn’t be a translator today if I’d grown up in the UK.

LATER NOTE (October 4 2008): a member of the ITI Council posted on the ITI website that he spoke to the DG in question and it appeared that either the Times reporter did not understand the discussion or the DG was misquoted. The DG decided not to issue a correction to the article because they did not think it was necessary.

Some projects have an air of doom from the outset. But I could be wrong.

Somehow I feel that Franconian cuisine is both more and less than this.

Attempted interpretation of the above, L to R, top row first:

Can it really be a Currywurst? Fried egg on Leberkäse (which contains neither liver nor cheese), possibly mashed potatoes
Schnitzel in a roll, Schnitzel with chips, six Nuremberg sausages with sauerkraut (Sechs mit Kraut)

2 Wiener with a roll, Currywurst? with a roll, Leberkäse with a roll
3 Nuremberg sausages in a roll (Drei im Weckla), chips (French fries)?

Where is the Schäufele? Carp? Saure Zipfel?

Opposite the Jewish Museum, by the way.

Proponents of Proposition 8 in California, ‘Eliminates the Right of Same-Sex Couples to Marry’, want it changed to ‘Limit on Marriage’. They think the verb ‘eliminates’ is negative and not typical of titles of legislation in California.

Superior Court Judge Timothy M. Frawley said ‘There is nothing inherently argumentative or prejudicial about transitive verbs, and the Court is not willing to fashion a rule that would require the Attorney General to engage in useless nominalization’.

Advocates of same-sex marriage were pleased with the decision.

I suppose one should keep an eye open for future transitive verbs, and make sure that there is no further nominalization.

(via Roger Shuy at Language Log)

I didn’t think I’d get a chance to photograph this, as I’m not likely to sit in a hide for a few hours.

Thank goodness they’re still selling it.

Goodbye Kompatibilitätsmodus.

The Guardian (and the Telegraph) report that Lucy Fairbrother’s mother thinks her weblog was tampered with:

The posting, A Short Stay in Tibet, begins with a description of life there and turns into a polemic against China, but appears to have been clumsily changed to read more sympathetically. It reads: “I admit that I have been under much influence of militant Free Tibet organisations back home. What China is doing now, and what China HAS done, are so different, and I am angry with myself for not realising the distinction before now.”

…Her mother, Linda, a TV journalist, said: “This certainly sounds unlike anything Lucy would have written. I saw the original and I certainly have no memory of anything like that figuring in it. It doesn’t sound like her phraseology. She read classics, she writes beautifully and this doesn’t sound at all like her style, quite apart from her sentiments. I would imagine it’s been done today. Students for a Free Tibet have in the past had tampering with their own internal emails.”

How beautifully Lucy writes is for readers to decide, but if the Chinese have altered the weblog, they also managed to alter the Wayback Machine – see here. Very clever, those Chinese.

LATER NOTE: My suspicions are shared by this letter to the Guardian today (thanks to Peter).