how did writing systems evolve?

All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Writing in the boustrophedon way

I remember this. I saw this manuscript in Rome. Kannu, you would be too young to remember this but I got so excited about this. What a great way to write. Much more efficient eh?
Absolutely fascinating. I wonder if we can have an app which does this for us? It would increase my efficiency at least 20-30%!
Very interesting

Boycott the English language says top French intellectual

I thought you might like this story about how the French are trying to protect the French language from being polluted by English. 

Languages are a bit like religion kids. They have a root, but they evolve and change as life goes on. When their speakers die or they don't want to change, the language also dies with them. Like so many religions have died as their worshipers died. It's a bit sad that that entire culture disappears like so many languages have done so as well. But life goes on and needs to evolve. Darwin would be nodding. You don't change you become extinct. 

Nobody speaks Latin or Sanskrit any more in common parlance. That's because they refused to change and therefore local vernacular languages took over. Classical Arabic is going the same way. Very few young people read or understand it. And so that's on its way out. 

And life goes on. 

Love

Baba

Boycott the English language says top French intellectual - Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/10397892/Boycott-the-English-language-says-top-French-intellectual.html

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A leading French intellectual has called for a boycott of all products whose advertising slogans use English and of films whose titles are not translated, in the latest salvo in a rearguard action against the “invasion” of Franceby the English language.

“There are more English words (in adverts) on the walls of Toulouse than there were German words during the Occupation,” said philosopher Michel Serres, a member of the Acadamie française, the state body which aims to protect the French language.

“I want to invite the French to go on strike. Each time that advertising is English, you don’t buy the product, each time a film’s title is not translated, you don’t go into the cinema,” he said in an interview with la Depeche du Midi newspaper.

why being multi lingual helps in business?

Dear Son
Here is an interesting article on what banks are asking for in their new recruits into the private banking world. You should be considering what would be good for you. You are numerate and you are very personable. What you are missing out on is the multi-lingual aspect.
Being multilingual helps, son, it helps you have a broader appreciation of the world, know about other cultures, be able to understand others. More importantly, it helps you make more money and be more successful in business. So if you are considering improving yourself, have a think about trying to improve on your language skills. If nothing else, try to get your Hindi up to speed, its not difficult, we can all speak Hindi at home. You should also consider other languages such as Mandarin or Spanish. It will really help you to a considerable degree. I am not saying that you need to be an expert, you need to have conversational skills and at the most, be able to read a newspaper, that's enough for the requirements of business.
Have a think, Mamma has some basic Hindi books at home, perhaps we all can start on it? Do you think that will help?
Love
Baba

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c9befe24-f991-11e0-bf8f-00144feab49a.html#ixzz1eKLB1Ut2
Search for talent: Only the trilingual, numerate and personable need apply
By Elaine Moore
What skills make the perfect wealth manager?
Charm, certainly. Contacts, maybe. But as the private banking industry seeks to attract a new generation of clients across a wider map than ever before, a new set of talents is in demand.
Multilingual, personable graduates equally at ease discussing complex structured products and safe haven assets are needed by private banks to fill offices in some of the world’s fastest growing economies.
But finding the right recruits is not easy.
HSBC has increased the number of places on its graduate scheme in the last year, but requirements are tough.
Prospective hires must be proficient in at least three languages, have a strong academic background and a genuine enthusiasm for the financial world, says Charles Hoffman, managing director at HSBC Private Bank.
Those who make the grade are offered a four- to eight-week graduate programme, followed by three six-month rotations, during which they are seated with experienced private bankers who specialise in client relationship management, support functions or product development. At the end of the process the new recruits should be ready to take on their own clients.
Carol Costa joined the HSBC scheme from her home country of Brazil and is embedded in the London office on her first rotation.
She says the worldwide movement and opportunity to spend time with senior management is an amazing way to start a career, although the reality of training has differed from her expectations of instant glamour and client meetings.
The first month of technical instruction underlined the fact that a career in private banking requires knowledge of services and products, not just client relationship building.
And finding the people with the right mix of talents who can fulfil these roles can be hard. In search of fresh pools of talent many private banks have been increasingly turning to lateral hires.
Coutts, one of the UK’s oldest private banks, has launched a pilot programme aimed at employees in different areas of the financial industry as well as its own staff who understand the high net worth market and can be trained in its own platform and products to become private bankers.
The bank has been explicit about its hopes to drive up revenue in its overseas business by more than half in the next few years.
Along with much of the industry, it is hoping to expand its remit from conventional private banking to investment management, and has raised its minimum requirement for investable assets that clients must hold from £500,000 to £1m.
Seeking out those with a non-private banking background who may have the right relationship skills, or have experience in a particular area outside the world of wealth management, has been a success, says Elsa Critchley, head of HR at Coutts.
This is particularly the case in those markets where there is a wide shortage of quality private bankers, such as Asia.
In countries that lack a large pool of candidates from which to pick, other banks have been setting up schools to train graduates in the art of wealth management.
Credit Suisse runs its own corporate university with a business school in Singapore and Hong Kong. Citigroup has also run a wealth management associates programme at Citi Private Bank Asia Pacific since 2006 to funnel a pool of potential employees through its doors.
But the effort involved pays off, according to Paul Patterson, global head of trust at RBC Wealth Management, and goes beyond the individual’s contribution to the bank.
“Our experience is that our graduate trainees relate to, and become important advocates of, our corporate culture, which we see as a key differentiator in the market,” he says.
But smaller wealth managers without the resources to set up their own schools or schemes have had to take a more informal approach.
Société Générale Private Banking Hambros says it uses a variety of methods to find and develop wealth managers.
“Being a relatively small bank we do not have a formal structured graduate trainee scheme,” says Phil Mcilwraith, group commercial director. “Our approach is more informal, recruiting both experienced wealth managers and other individuals with the potential to succeed.”
This process allows managers to work with SGPB Hambros teams in different locations or in different parts of the organisation.
The scheme may be less formal, but the time the bank spends educating new recruits on its own product range is substantial, and reducing attrition is essential for schemes like this one to earn its keep.
The answer, according to some, is to ensure that graduates forge connections across the bank that will last beyond the specific time of the training scheme. In other words: mentors.
HSBC, for example, appoints mentors who are responsible for graduates throughout their rotations and can provide guidance, support and encouragement during and after the programme.
This year Coutts began a slightly different mentoring model. Its reverse mentoring scheme requires young members of the private bank, typically graduate trainees, to be allocated senior executives and tasked with educating them in the mysterious world of social networking, virals and trolls in a process that lasts between six months to a year.
The purpose is to help senior bank staff gain a better grip of the ways that young clients might communicate and interact – typically through technology – and to encourage new employees to make connections with established bankers.
Coutts says it plans to roll out the scheme across all of its offices.

Going back to school

So I decided to go back to school. To be precise, Institute of Persian Language and Literature Studies. To learn Persian as a language. Why? well, good question. Now that I have finished my last PhD, I am at a bit of a loose end and need to do something to keep the old couple of rusty neurons in knick otherwise I will end up spending time on facebook or blogging jokes or watching tv or eating. Wait, I already do that. Erm. Well, ok.

Anyway, this is what I am currently thinking about. You see, the antecedents of the current Companies Act and how they were established goes back to the British East India Company, Dutch East India Company etc., way back bazillions of years. In particular, the British East India Company was particularly instrumental in the way they established the principles of corporate management for the world. The other strand which impacted modern corporate management is the accounting strand going way back to the Egyptians and then down to the Venetians and and and, but not interested in that, had enough of accounting thank you very much.

So we have the British East India Company now arriving in India back in the time of the Mughals and they are starting to trade. So how did they actually trade? What were the corporate structures? How did they manage the liaison with local counterparties? How were the contracts arranged? Indemnified? Collateral? In cases of disputes locally, who dealt with them and under what legal code? How did the local Indian code influence the workings of the British East India Company?

But then what happened was that the British East India Company slowly started to have fiduciary as well as political power locally in India. This meant that it had to actively rule. Now there was a body of law here in the UK back at that time, there was some maritime law, but for a corporate like BEIC, it had to start drawing up an Indian corpus of law otherwise it would be absolutely chaos and corruption (as it proved). So it started drawing up various laws and and and. But that gave rise to many issues. If the BEIC is going to rule Indians on the basis of British Law, then how can it handle the fact that the Indians previously were ruled on the basis of Sharia, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, etc. etc. legal systems. And you simply cannot take up a legal system which has been designed for the UK and plonk it down locally. As you can appreciate, this created an almighty stink, confusion and massive set of inconsistencies. As soon as they would reconcile one bit between say British maritime law and local Madras shipping, it wouldn't fit in with the processes in Fort William or Surat or Bombay. If they fixed everything in India, it would be out of kilter with what’s happening in the UK. Based upon my reading, this was one of the major reasons why the BEIC lost, the mutiny happened, etc. etc.

So how did the local Indian magistrates and royal courts function when the BEIC was bumbling around? How did they deal with disputes? How was the escalation made way back to the British Crown? How did they respond? What were the differences between the Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Tribal, etc. etc. courts and how did they mesh with the BEIC legal work?

I can get the British end of the information quite easily from the Kew Archives, India Office Archives and and and. Tons of stuff here. But guess what? the information in India is not that easy to procure because at this period, the court language in most of the Indian Kingdoms was? Guess. Yes, you are right, it was Persian. So I have to get to a middling level of Persian understanding of formal, courtly, scholarly writing in couple of years. Don't need to learn philosophy level of Persian. So when I go to the Indian archives, I will be faced with Persian stuff. Sanskrit I can handle (ish). So that’s the plan.

So off I toddled over to school. Lovely place, you enter and there is a huge open hall. That’s the library, full of wonderful books in Persian and a small section of English language books. And just off it, was the classroom. Popped in there and there were 4 more students in this elementary class and a lovely teacher. We explored some of the common Persian words. I was amazed, so much of India’s history, linguistics, culture and and and has been borrowed from Iran. Its extraordinary. I never knew that.

Spent the 1.5 hours being totally befuddled. The habit of writing right to left, the fact that the numbers are written left to right, the alphabet is borrowed from Arabic but not fully, there are differences. So many times, I was looking bewildered at the teacher, but we went through the vowels and made some words and sentences. More to work. And I have assignments (10-20 sentences to make), write 20-50 Iranian words. So my very rusty knowledge of Urdu should come in use, but fun.

I could almost feel some of the neurons getting stretched. Nice one. But for the next couple of years, I guess my Saturdays have gone. lol. But I have to immerse myself in Iran and Persia, so have ordered a shedload of Iranian history books, culture, and and and. Happy days, now I know how a pig feels when he has been given a load of warm potatoes and a bed of warm squishy mud.

Greek Synod Condemns Mass in Modern Greek

What is with this? I quote:

The Greek-Orthodox Synod has condemned the Mass in modern language officiated in the diocese of Nicopolis, claiming that it puts "the Church's unity" at risk. Bishop Meletio of Nicopolis, in the northern region of Epirus, authorised, a long time ago, the translation of the Mass from liturgical Greek (close to the ancient Greek language and once spoken by the upper classes) into modern or "popular" Greek. He justified his decision saying, "otherwise the faithful don't understand the holy liturgy". But the Synod, the press reports, has ruled that translating the holy texts is forbidden; it is only allowed "as an exception and after the authorisation" of the Church. In the absence of a joint version, according to the orthodox leaders, a spontaneous and causal translation of the liturgy "could jeopardise the Church's unity". The Synod has taken its decision despite the fact that Meletio seems to enjoy the support of his believers and has obtained the official support of other bishops.

Looking down the ages, you find that you end up with this situation all the time. The priests always get upset when their role in being the sole channel to God is usurped by people who convert arcane religious mumblings into things that ordinary people understand. Some examples:

1. Tulsidas rendered the Ramayana into colloquial Avadhi rather than Sanskrit. This made this story very popular, but the Brahmins were quite upset about this. By the way, take a look at this online book, a pretty nice overview of the various (300 odd) versions of the Ramayana.

2. There are constant battles over the translation of the Quran. Here’s another link on how a translation into Dari got some of the fundo’s all excited.

3. The Bible translations were also contentious. Here’s an example. When the translations started to happen in the middle ages, like the Greek Synod of now, the then Pope, Innocent III, and Pope Gregory IX got upset and forbade them in the 12th and 13th Century respectively.

This just shows the fragility of these religious minds who think that the power of the word of God is somehow diminished because a different language is used. Tiny narrow minds!

Incidentally, I came across this great online book on Introducing Translation Studies. It offers a good academic coverage of this fascinating field. As for the Greeks, bah!

The strange case of Jazak Allah

I find it very amusing when I see Indian’s start off with this Jazak Allah and Allah Hafiz business. We speak Urdu back home but to show that they are more Arab than Indian, this Jazak Allah business is getting more and more popular. Dont they realise how pretentious they sound? This Pakistani op-ed reflects how silly this is:

Like most urban middle class folks these days, a friend of mine too has a habit of using the term Inshallah (God willing) a lot. So one day I asked him why is almost every sentence uttered by my fellow Pakistanis punctuated with an Inshallah?

His reply was the usual: “So? What is wrong with using Inshallah?”

“Absolutely nothing,” I said. “In fact I sometimes use it myself. But why do some of us use it constantly? Will things not happen the way we want them to if we don’t use it?”

“Perhaps,” he said.

“Then this means God didn’t will them to happen, right?” I asked.

“But, of course,” my friend replied.

“But maybe we too had something to do with them not happening?” I suggested.

“We can give it our best shot. The final decision is with God,” he said.

“But then what happens to the whole concept of free will?” I asked. “Hasn’t God given us the physical and intellectual faculties to carve out our own destiny?”

“What’s your point?” He asked.
“Doesn’t using Inshallah so often make it lose its meaning?” I asked.

“Like how?” he inquired.

“For example,” I explained, “A friend of mine ordered some pizza yesterday. When he asked the pizza delivery guy how long it will take for him to deliver the pizza, the guy answered, ‘in forty minutes Inshallah!”

“Well,” he smiled. “There’s really no harm in it.”

“But why involve God in the simple matter of delivering a pizza, for heaven’s sake!” I laughed.
“So, how did your friend respond?” he asked.

“He was pretty peeved. So he responded by shouting Jazzak Allah!” I laughed again.

“That’s nice of him,” he said. “One should always say Jazzak Allah instead of thank you.”

“Really?” I said with a sideways smile. “There is an Urdu word for thank you as well. It’s called, ‘shukria’. If you remember, the national language is Urdu and not Arabic!”

“Listen,” he responded, “If someone wants to say Jazzak Allah instead of thank you, what’s the big deal?”

“True,” I said. “Just like there’s no big deal if somebody wants to say thank you instead of shukria, or shukria instead of Jazzak Allah.”

My friend shook his head: “What’s with you and your dislike of Arabic?”

“I never said that, did I?” I protested. “All I am saying is that most Pakistanis are forgetting that Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi, Sariki, Balochi and Pushtu are our languages and not Arabic! What’s this new fetish with folks trying to make us all spout Arabic words? How does this make us better Muslims?”

“But you do not have a problem with using English words!” He retorted.

“Dude, I’m not sending emails and a barrage of SMS text messages asking people to become secular by using English words!” I replied.

“What do you mean?” He said.

“Oh, come on, you know what I mean,” I said. “People sending text messages and emails telling Muslims to become better Muslims by saying ‘Allah Hafiz’ instead of ‘Khuda Hafiz;’ ‘Jazzak Allah’ instead of ‘thank you;’ ‘salat’ instead of namaz.’. What’s more, what is this other new idea of shouting Alhamdulillah instead of answering with a simple ‘yes’ or a ‘haan?”

“Chalo jee, now you have a problem with that too,” my friend chuckled.

“Of course, I do,” I said. “Sometimes I feel one can now hear more Urdu on the streets of Dubai than in the drawing-rooms of Pakistan!”

“Stop exaggerating!” He protested.

“No, really,” I explained, “How has using Arabic words made our society any better? Also, now more Pakistanis go to the mosque than before, how has that made things any better?”

“This is your old argument,” my friend said, in a shrugging tone. “So what should one do? Stop going to the mosque?

“No,” I said. “But you must admit it is a valid argument.”

“Fine, but that is because we are still not following true Islam!” he explained.

“Oh?” I replied. “And who decides what true Islam is?”

“God will decide!” He announced, rhetorically.

“Doesn’t seem that way in this country, though,” I said. “It seems every other middle-class person, young or old, has become an expert religious adviser. They sound as if they are saying something profound but in reality they are only spouting clichéd traditionalist tirades that they hear from televangelists or what they read on various Internet websites!”

“You’re being judgmental,” my friend claimed.

“Judgmental?” I retorted. “Dude, have you ever heard your born-again Jazzak Allah brigade? Forget infidels, they do not hesitate in calling some of their fellow Muslims atheists and kafir as well.”

“I know,” my friend replied. “They are misled.”

“So, this means only misled people say Inshallah, Jazzak Allah and Alhamdullilah?” I smiled.

“Don’t twist my words,” he protested.

“I won’t, but only if this pseudo-Arabic brigade stops asking Pakistanis to twist their tongues in pursuit of bagging God’s approval. It’s downright bizarre hearing some perfectly sane Pakistanis talking as if they’re from Yemen!” I said, exasperated.

“Well, using ‘dude’ and ‘mate’ is as weird,” he said.

“Sure,” I smiled. “But I promise you, mate, there’s no divine approval attached to it.”

Bangladeshis rush to learn English by mobile

Quite an interesting development here. I quote:

The project, which costs users less than the price of a cup of tea for each three-minute lesson, is being run by the BBC World Service Trust, the international charity arm of the broadcaster. Part of a UK government initiative to help develop English skills in Bangladesh, it marks the first time that mobile phones have been used as an educational tool on this scale.

Through its Janala service, the BBC offers 250 audio and SMS lessons at different levels. Each lesson is a three-minute phone call, costing about 3 taka (2.6p).

One basic lesson involves listening to and repeating simple dialogue like: “What do you do?” “I work in IT, what about you?” “I’m a student.” “That’s nice.” Another is devoted to differentiating vowel sounds like those in ship and sheep or leaf and live.

All six mobile phone operators in Bangladesh have agreed to cut the cost of calls to the service by 50 per cent to make it more affordable. Ms Chamberlain said the project team was in talks with the mobile phone companies to increase capacity to cope with the unexpectedly high demand.

The language lessons are mainly targeting 18 to 24-year-olds, who typically had five or more years of formal education, but whose training in English had been weak. The target market is people living on less than 10,000 taka ($145, €97, £87) a month, who would struggle to pay for formal English lessons.

Education by mobile phones. This can be used to drive other educational programmes as well. I was discussing with a friend of mine about how to use Google Wave in educational institutions after the idea was sparked by a discussion online. I think I am going to try to see if any of my professor friends around the country would be interested to see if we can roll this out for a class somewhere. The idea being that we can have twitter, sms, email, online conversations, documents all mixed up when we are evaluating a proposal or something like that, all inside a class.

But this is indeed very interesting. Worth watching out for.

Economic performance of the Arabic book translation industry in Arab countries

One of the quotes that caught my eye while reading the Arab Human Development Report back in 2003 was:

• Spain translates in one year the number of books that have been translated into Arabic in the past 1000 years and
• For every one million Arabs only one book is translated into Arabic each year

While the latter is difficult to compare and contrast, but then the first one is particularly poignant. The Arab world being what it is, getting them out of the rut of ignorance and misery is important. As before, education is a vital component in getting these people out of their current state and for what, they need books. And if the books haven't been translated into Arabic, then you have an issue. See here for a good step in fixing this issue.

Then I saw this paper (the abstract is at the bottom). Pretty good detailed research with some good recommendations. There are serious points to be raised here which the Abstract talks about so I am not going to belabour the point. I quote some important bits that the abstract missed out:

Next Page Foundation conducted the first readership survey in five Arab countries (Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Tunisia) in 2005. The main conclusions of this survey can be summarised as follows:

• With the exception of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, a share larger than expected of the literates in the other countries surveyed does not read.
• Among those who read the share of infrequent (up to 30 minutes per day) and low readers (31-60 minutes per day) makes up the majority.
• Reading is something children learn at school; there is almost no reading support by family members.
• Reading is stopped at ages 15-19; it is closely linked to leaving school or other institutions of education.
• Most who decrease or stop reading do not return to reading at all.
• School does not initiate reading for life but limits this to school only; deficits must be seen in school manuals and in the absence of young adult literature.
• Arabic is the preferred language of reading.
• More books in this language on topics of interest would make a considerable part of readers read more.
• There is a high religious-mindedness in terms of content and topics of reading.
• Interests professed for certain topics do not necessarily translate into the reading of such topics. (From Next Page Foundation Home Page: www.npage.org).

And these Arab Countries can be considered to be the top of the list of Arab countries. If this is the level at the top, then you can well imagine the situation lower down the list. But the authors missed out on the biggest factor (the religious establishment) and was very light on the second biggest factor (the government sector). The first bit relates to the second last aspect in the previous list. If most if not all what you read is religious pap, then knowledge generation will be challenging. After all, blind faith sits very uneasily with ever questioning knowledge generation. And the religious establishment is extremely tight in all these countries.

To let the common man be educated and questioning will directly hit them. Secondly, none of these countries are exactly free. Their method of control of their population is to keep them ignorant or in the bit of the somnolent daze. An example is their tight control over the media. If your media isn't free, how on earth do you expect your book publication and translation industry to be free and break its bounds? You cannot simultaneously have a free and open reading society while your political system, your educational and your religious establishment is under chains.

That said, the recommendations that the authors give can only do good. I quote:

The first such role is that of improving the quality and availability of the generalised inputs that publishing companies draw on, such as educated human resources (qualified translators and other specialized personal), physical and technological infrastructure (hardware and software for information communication technology) and capital.

Second, government should encourage upgrading and innovation with the aid of rules, regulations, and incentives. Through regulations, tax policies, the enforcement of IPR, antitrust laws, and many other measures, governments influence the climate in which publishing companies compete. That influence should be used to encourage investment, innovations, and other determinants of economic performance.

Third, government should leverage its investment in skills, research capabilities and infrastructure to facilitate the process by which all local clusters form and develop. Such investment feeds whole groups of firms and industries. Thinking in terms of clusters rather than industries also encourages publishing companies to work closely with suppliers and customers.

Fourth, and perhaps most subtly, government leaders should challenge local companies and people in their regions to raise their sights and strive for greater competitiveness. The ability of government to signal the future fosters economic upgrading.

Policies affecting production factor conditions:

• Improve the documentation of Arabic translation needs. This can be achieved by creating a regional Internet-based database that would constitute an information base on what has been translated, what is being translated, and what will be translated from foreign languages into Arabic.
• Design and implement translation support programs on a sustainable basis. This would create and maintain a critical mass of translators and publishing companies. The supply side of the translation industry would be strengthened.
• Invest in human resources by building a strong basic education system for all citizens, thus eradicating illiteracy; by setting high educational standards; by supporting institutions that develop specialised skills (such as specialised professional translators); and last, but not least, by creating incentives for company investment in training.
• Support science and technology by creating incentives for private research and development (for example, in the area of electronic publishing, e-commerce, machine translation software development, and so forth) and for promoting wide dissemination of basic scientific knowledge in areas that affect the development of the Arabic translation industry.
• Invest in physical infrastructure; the special needs of the Arabic translation industry should also be taken into consideration.
• Create some sort of accreditation body for translators to control for good quality and to lessen the costs of asymmetric information in the Arabic translation industry.

Policies affecting demand conditions:

• Support readership surveys. This would help to identify the real needs of the reading public, as well as to monitor whether reading promotion policies in general and translation support programs in particular have a measurable impact, especially on young people.
• Stimulate early demand for translated books in Arabic; for instance, for public schools, universities, and public administration.
• Act as a sophisticated buyer in purchasing (ask for high quality of translated books).
• Promote translation quality assessment programs. To enhance demand for translated books, programs for translation quality control are needed.

Policies affecting related and supporting industries:

• Facilitate cluster development along the lines of the value chain of the book industry.
• Promote training programs among professional of the Arabic translation industry in the fields of marketing and distribution.
• Improve distribution outlets.
• Promote the role of nongovernmental professional publishing and translation associations in disseminating knowledge and mobilising resources, thus creating positive externalities in the Arabic translation industry.

Policies affecting strategy, structure and rivalry:

• Promote local competition by deregulating the structure of industry and strictly enforcing antitrust policy and IPRs.
• Expand interregional and international trade and investment by opening book markets, promoting exports, and attracting appropriate foreign investment in those markets.

My only objection is, these recommendations are effectively asking for a complete rejig of how their societies work. If one doesnt do that, then it would be like providing a pan of makeup to a person suffering skin cancer.

Knowledge has always been at the heart of economic growth and development. It is disseminated chiefly through the different stages of education, R&D, the mass media and the translation industry. In Arab countries there has been a widespread impression that there is a low level of translation activities, which in turn has led to a low output of the translation industry in those countries. This paper addresses this issue; its overall objectives are: (1) to describe the economic performance of the Arabic book translation industry in Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Syria; (2) to understand empirically the economic performance of that industry, the focus here being on qualitatively analysing the major determinants (positive and negative factors) affecting the growth process of that industry; and (3) to provide policy makers and business leaders in the Arab region with theoretically sound and evidence-based advice on the issues analysed in the project.
To provide an empirical base for answering those questions, both published data and fresh new data have been used. For the latter purpose, a questionnaire-based survey was conducted in the year 2005 among 190 experts, covering firm representatives and experts in industry and government. The Porter (Diamond) model has been used as a theoretical background. The empirical results were incorporated in five national case studies. This paper synthesises the results of the national reports, giving a comparative account of the performance of the Arabic book translation industry in the five Arab countries.
The overall results suggest that the Arabic book translation industry in these Arab countries has not yet achieved the level of development of other developing and developed countries. Underperformance of the Arabic book translation industry is attributable to (among other factors) severe coordination failures. This is a state of affairs in which the inability of the different agents (translators, book publishers, suppliers, customers, and supporting organisations, state, and so forth) to coordinate their behaviour (choices) leads to suboptimal outcomes. Since the economic performance of the translation industry often involves complementary investments whose return depends on other investments being made by other agents, coordination is crucial. Obviously, neither market forces nor the state have undertaken this coordination activity sufficiently. The Arabic book translation industry seems to suffer from both market failure and government failure.
In light of these results the Arabic book translation industry offers great economic potential that should be mobilised systematically in the future. This paper discusses how this can be achieved, based on a well-designed and implemented process of upgrading and innovation in companies, industries, and clusters related to translation activities. Public policy, properly understood and adequately implemented, can play an important role in this process.

Keywords: Economics of translation; Arabic translation; Arab World; translation industry; Morocco; Egypt; Saudi Arabia; Lebanon; Syria

Perils of bad punctuation

This was the story. I quote:

Man badly beaten for confronting 'vandals'

A man who challenged a gang of alleged teenage vandals received horrific injuries after stepping in, a graphic photograph shows.

 

Not a problem, but the reason it caught my eye was that I was reading on my Google reader and this is what it showed:

 

Man badly beaten for confronting 'vandals'

from Telegraph News | All News

A man who challenged a gang of alleged teenage vandals received horrific injuries after stepping in a graphic photograph shows.

 

chuckle

if you miss a comma, the whole sentence goes awry…I wouldn't like to step into a graphic photograph either if the result is this:

My sister frequently does this to me when I make punctuation/grammar mistakes, mind you…

Technorati Tags: english,grammar

Are police translation expenses wasted?

I received this email, which has been anonymised for obvious reasons:

> Under the FOI act I asked all the police forces in Britain how much
> they spent in interpreters and translations.
> Below you will see the responses I've got.
> Unless it's specified,all the figures are fot the year 2007/08.
> Please note the huge amounts spent by the UK Border Agency and the
> Metropolitan Police.
> Also you will see some figures for the previous years,so you can
> notice how much this cost increased in the last years.
>
> CLeveland Police 113,120 (08)
>
> Dorset Police 201,900
>
> Hampshire constabulary 523,724
>
> Central Scotland police 52,423
>
> Essex Police 519,886
>
> Avon & Somerset Police 470,523
>
> West Mercia Police 386,223
>
> Bedfordshire Police 340,916 (08)
>
> Humberside police 361,168
>
> Norfolk Constabulary 238,598
>
> Hertfordshire Police 371,065
>
> Dumfrics & Galloway constabulary 14,578
>
> North Wales Police 162,554 (07/08) - 43,886 (03)
>
> Gwent police 127,724 (08)
>
> Tayside Police 42,561
>
> Nottinghamshire Police 321,652
>
> West Midlands Police 2,284,594
>
> West Yorkshire Police 1,278,000
>
> Strathclyde Police 228,290 (07/08) - 85,325 (03/04)
>
> Devon & Cornwall Constabulary 281,609 (07/08) - 32,000 (1999/2000)
>
> British Transport Police 210,538
>
> Cambridgeshire Constabulary 540,509
>
> Durham Police 66,117 (08)
>
> Thames Valley Police 1,082,082 (07/08) - 871,466 (05/06)
>
> Grampian Police 58,770
>
> Derbyshire Constabulary 319,324  51 languages interpreted
>
> Northamptonshire Police 324,758
>
> Wiltshire COnstabulary 294,170 (08)
>
> UK Border Agency 9,901,000
>
> Cumbria Police 88,073
>
> Warwickshire Police 159,253
>
> Cheshire police 77,500
>
> Northumbria Police 242,762
>
> North Yorkshire Police 183,523 (07/08) - 38,600 (03/04)
>
> Lothian & Borders Police 157,233
>
> Sussex police 102,881
>
> Northern police 23,947
>
> Fife Constabulary 39,152
>
> Greater manchester police 1,100,000
>
> Metropolitan Police 9,965,486
>
> Police Service northern Irealand 613,613 (07/08) - 74,993 (04/05)
>
> Gloucestershire Police 152,155
>
> Surrey police 325,323 (07/08) - 195,481 (03/04)
>
> Lancashire police 355,336
>
> Suffolk Police 258,596 (08)
>
> South Yorkshire police 649,913 (08)
>
> Leicestershire Police 373,157
>
> Staffordshire police 282,559
>
> Total £ 36,268,858
>
> If you add £3,650,667 spent by the department of work & pension and
> the £ 32,568,334 spent by the NHS you can be glad to know that £
> 72,487,879 of your money is wasted in interpreters and translations.

I was curious about this and spent some time digging into this and this is what I responded:

I am not sure that all this money is wasted. Foreign language expertise is required for a variety of reasons by the police officers. If you map the spend to tourist hotspots, you will see where the challenge is coming from. Assisting tourists in trouble. So we need to adjust this spend for the tourists who are spending their valuable tourist dollars in the UK.

Then we have a significant proportion of interpreting and translating requirements which emerge from the crown prosecution service. We have quite a lot of foreign corporate, criminal and civil cases which are executed across the world and have a British component. Hence the spend there is quite justified.

Then we need foreign language skills for crime fighting. Like it or not, we do have international crime syndicates, or non English speaking crime links, both demand and supply side ends in England. We need our police to have those skills to make sure that they fight crime. Then comes intelligence, counter terrorism and counter insurgency operations, again which requires a huge lump of foreign language skills.

No doubt quite a lot of spend is wasted on say illegal immigrants or even British citizens who cannot speak the language properly, but I wouldn’t say all the spend is wasted. Just take tourism, it’s the 8th most important industry in our country. As a comparison, the British Tourist Board just gets funded to the amount of about 35 million pounds. Here are some facts and figures

http://www.tourismtrade.org.uk/MarketIntelligenceResearch/KeyTourismFacts.asp

Quite remarkable, eh? Compared to the £16 billion spent by the tourists to the UK, I think the numbers look a bit more reasonable. We had 32.8 million visitors in 2007, one pound per visitor on translation costs roughly? What do you think?

Education minister's blog littered with spelling mistakes

Just what is with education ministers and pathetic educational performance? Check this out. I quote: 

The Labour MP's website was also found to contain typing errors and grammatical oversights.

The mispellings of Mr Knight, who was educated at Cambridge University, include "maintainence", "convicned", "curently", "similiar", "foce", "pernsioners", "reccess" and "archeaological".

Mr Knight, who is responsible for raising education standards, also clearly has problems with the "i before e, except after c" spelling rule taught to primary school pupils.

He spelled "achieving" and "received" incorrectly.

Mr Knight, 43, gives his opinions on local and national issues regularly on his website, which reveals he attended the fee-paying Eltham College, in Mottingham, south east London.

He went on to study geography, and social and political sciences at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, from 1984 to 1987.

Mr Knight, MP for Dorset South, said: "When I was at school the teachers told me to always check my work. While my spelling is generally pretty good, I need to focus more on checking."

Rob Wilson, the Conservative education spokesman, said: "He will be disappointed with his efforts in class but I'm sure he'll make every effort to improve now teacher has noticed he's falling behind."

Unbelievable. Before somebody says that I have too high standards, no. This is the education minister. Its like being an economics minister without any knowledge of economics (oh! sorry, Gordon Brown), or being the minister for aviation without having had taken one flight or been to an airport. And if this was a simple mistake, then sorry, that shows an alarming case of no attention to detail and inability to use spell check.

Technorati Tags: Languages

Famous Saying That Come From Britain

Interesting or what? Thanks, Peter :)

EATING HUMBLE PIE: Servants ate "umble pie" which was made from deer waste while their Master and his guests had the better cuts of meat.

TURN THE TABLES: Tables only had one finished side. The other side, less expensive to make, was more rough. When the family was alone, they ate on the rough side to keep the good side nice for company. When company came, the whole top lifted off and was turned to its good side.

RULE OF THUMB: An old English law declared that a man could not beat his wife with a stick any larger than the diameter of his thumb.

SLEEP TIGHT: The bed frames were strung with ropes on which straw mattresses were placed. After some time the ropes would loosen and one of the young men would pull them tight.

TIE THE KNOT: Tying the knot of the ropes in the marriage bed.

HONEYMOON: It was the accepted practise in Babylonia 4,000 years ago that for a month after the wedding, the bride's father would supply his son-in-law with all the mead he could drink. Mead is a honey beer, and because their calendar was lunar based, this period was called the "honey month" or what we know today as the "honeymoon".

THE CLINK: The name of a prison which was on Clink Street in the Southwark area of London.

SON OF A GUN: After sailors had crossed the Atlantic to the West Indies, they would take the native women on board the ship and have their way with them in between the cannons. Some of the women the sailors left behind would have boys, who were called sons between the guns.

DONE TO A TURN: Meat was roasted until cooked on an upright spit which had to be turned by hand.

BEAT AROUND THE BUSH: Game birds were scared out of their hiding places under bushes and then killed.

CUT THROUGH THE RED TAPE: Solicitors kept their clients papers in a file folder tied with red ribbon to prevent the papers from falling out. Of course, when they wanted to get at the papers, they would have to cut through the red tape.

MINDING YOUR Ps & Qs: Ale was served at local taverns out of a "tankard" ... you were charged by the angle of your elbow ... half-way up... you drank a pint, all the way up... you drank a quart. Since the Quart cost so much more than the Pint, you were warned to "Mind your Ps & Qs"

GETTING TANKED: When you drank too much out of the above "tankard" you were said to be "tanked" ... if you got so "tanked" that you passed out, there was a chance that somebody might think you had actually died. Since back then they didn't have experience with taking pulses, they often buried people alive who were actually in a drunken stupor or otherwise comatose.

WET YOUR WHISTLE: Many years ago in England, pub frequenters had a whistle baked into the rim or handle of their ceramic cups. When they needed a refill, they used to blow the whistle to get some service.

SAVED BY THE BELL: When our ancestors realised that they were burying a great deal of people before their time had actually come, they came up with a solution. They tied a string onto the "dead" person's hand, buried them, and tied the other end of the string to a bell and then tied it to nearby tree branch. If the person revived enough to ring the bell, their survivors would rush out and dig them up. Hence... "saved by the bell"

CHEW THE FAT: A host would offer his guests a piece of bacon, which was stored above the fireplace in the parlour, so they could chew the fat during their visit.

GETTING THE SHORT END OF THE STICK: Candles were expensive to make, so often reeds were dipped in tallow and burned instead. When visitors came, it was the custom for guests to make their exit by the time the lights went out. Therefore, if your host didn't want you to stay very long, he would give you a "short stick."

GIVING SOMEONE THE COLD SHOULDER: When a guests would over stay their welcome as house guests, the hosts would (instead of feeding them good, warm meals) give their too-long staying guests the worst part of the animal, not warmed, but the COLD SHOULDER.

FROG IN YOUR THROAT: Medieval physicians believed that the secretions of a frog could cure a cough if they were coated on the throat of the patient. The frog was placed in the mouth of the sufferer and remained there until the physician decided that the treatment was complete.

Technorati Tags: United Kingdom,History,Languages

A beautiful quote about Yiddish the language

Here's what Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer had to say about the language in his 1978 Nobel Prize acceptance speech:

"Yiddish language - a language of exile, without a land, without
frontiers, not supported by any government, a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics ...There is a quiet humour in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life,   every crumb of success, each encounter of love. The Yiddish mentality is    not haughty. It does not take victory for granted. It does not demand    and command but it muddles through, sneaks by, smuggles itself amidst    the powers of destruction, knowing somewhere that God's plan for Creation is still at the very beginning ...
   In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful Humanity."

Hat tip: Wotd

Technorati Tags: Judaism,Israel,Language

A further comment on English language imperialism and hegemony

On my previous posting, I got a comment

Abdou Diouf is right. The Hegemony of English is a threat to European languages and cultures. 1 billion dollars for multilingualism is nothing compare to the benefits accruing to the UK and to the USA as a consequence of the hegemonic role of THEIR language

I agree. But why am I as a British citizen being forced to pay for this? Why dont the people who demand protection of their languages pay for their own translations?

Also, I dont really see how USA and UK is actually forcing people to use their language. Do you see that? I dont. It just means that people find English easier to use and operate. So I am failing to understand how one blames the UK and USA. Do we also blame India? or Australia?

How about Italy for putting in the hegemony of Latin? Or Greece for the Greek bits? Or how about Saudi Arabia for Arabic? How about Hindi in India? How about the French for the French hegemony in Francophone Africa?

Languages and Religions grow because people are drawn to it and believe in it and use it. If they arent impressed, the language or religion will die out. And no amount of subsidy will save it. It will end up like Sanskrit and Latin !



All this to be taken with a grain of piquant salt!!!

Multilingualism 'declining' and translations in EU!

Multilingualism, as specified in the Treaties on the functioning of the EU institutions, is in danger of disappearing in favour of a de facto single-language regime based on English, warns Abdou Diouf, secretary-general of the 'Francophonie', the international French-language organisation, in an interview with EurActiv.

Are you surprised? No, I am afraid not. This is perhaps one of the logical end results of languages which become more popular and after some time, other languages die out. See here on world's languages dying off.

Plus given the fact that the EU has now ended up with 20-25 official languages, do you know how much it costs the EU in translation costs?

• ONE
• BILLION
• DOLLARS

Here are some interesting stats

Technorati Tags: European Commission , Europe , Languages