Translators Not Welcome?

What have politicians got against the Translation Service Industry? Here's one who objects to the government opening up jobs for translators. From the Taipei Times, Sept. 27, 2013.

Translation skills fall short: legislator

WASTEFUL:Despite all the money spent on recruiting foreign-language specialists, government agencies cannot even do their own translation, a lawmaker said

By Chen Yen-ting and Jason Pan  /  Staff reporter, with staff writer

Questioning the foreign-language skills of civil servants, Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) Legislator Hsu Chung-hsin (許忠信) said the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other government agencies are wasting taxpayers’ money contracting out translation work.

Speaking at a press briefing earlier this week, Hsu asked why these agencies could not find people in their departments to do Chinese-to-English translation.

“Is it because they are not capable of doing the job?” he asked.

Hsu said that based on his calculations, NT$53.73 million (US$1.81 million) out of a total budget of NT$70 million allocated for next year for translation — mainly from Chinese to English — could be done by civil servants.

“The foreign ministry is in charge of international affairs, and it is the government agency that has the most number of foreign-language specialists,” he said. “And yet, the ministry has allocated NT$15.98 million for translation, then subsequently added another NT$5.04 million for editing and translating articles and government information publications.”

Hsu said English is a major subject in civil servant examinations and it accounts for up to 40 percent of the test score for some ministries.

“The government has also allocated a substantial amount of money for English-language training courses for bureaucrats to enhance their English proficiency. Yet a majority of government agencies still contract out English translation and editing jobs to translation service companies, or to do work on their bilingual Web sites, or any information that has to be put in English,” Hsu said.

The problem is conspicuous in government agencies that are staffed with foreign-language specialists, such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Economic Affairs’ Office of Trade Negotiations and International Cooperation Department, and the Council for Economic Planning and Development, he said.

Instead of doing the work themselves, almost all foreign-language translation jobs are contracted out, he said.

“It is a big waste of money. The government is not making the best use of the English-language expertise of our civil servants,” he said.

“[President] Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) touting of Taiwan moving a step closer to internationalization is just empty talk. People in Ma’s administration are limited to communicating in Chinese,” Hsu said.

With the government facing a budget shortfall of NT$300 billion for next year, government agencies should look for ways to cut spending and curtail waste, such as doing their own translation and editing instead of contracting it out, he said.

In response, Chang Yu-yen (張玉燕), head of the foreign ministry’s Department of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, said that most of the budget allocation for translation is to cover work on periodicals and other publications that used to be managed by the now defunct-Government Information Office.

Chiu Lung-teng (邱隆藤), deputy head of foreign ministry’s Department of International Information Services, added that the foreign ministry’s employees already have a heavy work load.

“Most of our publications and periodicals deal with many different professional disciplines. This presents some difficulties for people in our department

, so we have to contract out the translation and editing work,” Chiu said.

Original Source:

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2013/09/27/2003573133

Discipline Demands a Sense of Humor

How amazingly disappointing it is to read news reports of teachers who fall back upon abuse as a form of classroom management. Then again, how encouraging it is to see that these cases are increasingly rare, and when they do occur they become sensational. No longer is physical punishment a part of the daily routine of most teachers.

The most recent escapade in cruelty involved a primary school teacher who was accused of "inappropriately disciplining his third-grade students" with methods ranging from having the kids vote for the least popular classmate, calling the children "losers" and "scum," and mocking their parents. This follows relatively swiftly on the heels of a story about another primary school teacher who lost his temper after a male student threw a paper airplane at a girl in class. The teacher allegedly slapped the boy at least 20 times, stopping only when the boy broke into tears.

I am unsure which tale of brutality is worse, though I suspect the most recent revelation is more disturbing because it does not suggest a loss of temper or a poorly controlled fit of rage, but a teacher who has obviously been going through a long process of professional disillusionment and burnout. This instructor's verbal abuse, if proven to be true, reveals a man trapped in a job he hates, working with students he has come to loathe. This teacher deserves our pity, not our condemnation. He needs guidance, therapy, and a friend who can encourage him toward a career change.

Changing careers is never easy, the choice being made more difficult by considerations of pension and training. But if this teacher's personal emotional problems are not dealt with, he will spend the rest of his life in misery, and his unhappiness will continue to manifest itself as a meanness that will damage the psyches of his students. That would be a real tragedy, for as third graders they are still quite innocent and capable of being molded into individuals whose spirits are guided by love, compassion, curiosity, and a desire for all good things of beauty and light.

I was much surprised that a good number of online essays resulting from a Google Search of the term "Discipline in the EFL Classroom." A rough perusal of these offerings suggests the advice that every experienced and qualified instructor would give: set the rules at the start of the class, and keep reminding students of what is expected of them; keep your classes fast-paced and interesting; control your temper and call upon your good sense of humor, etc.

This last bit of advice is especially relevant, especially when I consider the case of the junior high art teacher who found himself the brunt of a satirical piece of student art depicting him as a horned devil. The teacher demanded a "sincere apology" before he would be willing to remove the demerit from the young girl's permanent record, but the student denied the drawing of the horned man was of the teacher. I can understand the teacher's anger, which is driven more by the student's refusal to accept accountability and offer a sincere apology. (At least this teacher is not forcing the student to print an apology in the local newspaper, as happened in China some weeks ago.) The case of the art teacher makes me wonder if the incident could have been handled more properly with a sense of humor.

Maybe it is the stress and disappointment of the job that causes us to take ourselves a wee bit too seriously, but at the end of the day we've got to push it all aside with a smile and be grateful that we are in such a wonderful profession. 

I definitely can see the need for a class in how to handle stress and burnout. Hopefully I can advance this idea as a top priority when my colleagues at National Ilan University's Graduate Program in Foreign Languages & Literature begins shaping its new curriculum later this year. From the look of things taking place on the ground, we need to talk less about "theory" and focus more on the battles that we face every day as teachers.

Does Every High School Kid Need College?

HSBC Group Chairman Zhang Hong-jia  said last week that not every high school graduate in Taiwan has to go to college in order to attain a successful career. He was speaking at an event advocating the importance of vocational education organized by the Ministry of Education (MOE). The businessman suggested young people—or more importantly their parents—should give greater consideration to the vocational education system, where they can learn practical hands-on skills and gain practical crafts-and-industry related experience before entering the workplace. With some experience behind them, they can then choose to pursue further studies on their own.

Jia’s suggestion makes sense, though his words will not likely be heard or taken seriously by most parents in Taiwan. Hard work, especially physical labor, is not taken seriously by much of Taiwan’s middle and upper class families. Their eyes are set on desk jobs for their children, a fantasy encouraged by contemporary television commercials that build a falsely romantic image of businessmen. I don’t recall exactly where I read it, but I do remember an opinion piece in the news earlier this year lamenting the loss or dramatic decline of many “trade” skills such as carpentry, plumbing, even agriculture. I need to do some re-reading, but I think this is actually a prejudice inherited from the ancient writings of Confucius, who seemed (if my memory is again not at fault) to place government service over farming. (I’m speaking of a quote in the Analects that says something like “choose farming and you starve, choose government service and you never starve.”) The loss of certain traditional skills was documented in a new book titled Lost Memories.

Professors throughout the many levels of higher education in Taiwan can surely attest to having met many students who were simply too immature for college and university environments. They have enough social skills to avoid the boot, but they never truly benefit from their years in school and end up passing through as mediocrities at best, major class irritants at worst. We've all seen them and thought that their time would be better spent working in the service or labor industries, where they might have an opportunity to mature intellectually while experiencing the real world of complex workplace relationships. When they are perhaps a bit more familiar with themselves and their actual abilities or interests, they can return to university to pursue a very focused educational goal.

This is, I suspect, what HSB Chairman Zhang was advocating at the MOE event. These are also the arguments put forth some decades ago by Robert Pirsig in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. If you haven’t read it, you should. It will certainly influence the way you see the higher education industry in Taiwan.

The discussion of practical skills has also been personally important to me, as our Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at National Ilan University has this past week voted to open a Graduate Degree program focused on Culture Studies or Literary Studies. Going into this decision we faced a degree of criticism from those who see literature as a path away from a good career, but in actuality I believe that literature is the best path toward a fruitful career. More on that later, though your comments are welcome now.

Protest, Speech and Democratic Principles

The news of a protest against National Taiwan University (NTU) is both hopeful and heartbreaking. The hope comes from seeing students stand up against a strong institution that has the ability to make a very impressive response. These kids are brave and highly principled. The disappointment stems from the conservative reaction that followed this experience of democratic principles in action.

The protest took place on Tuesday, November 15 (2011), during the university's anniversary celebration ceremony. As NTU president Lee Si-chen was offering his opening address, some 30 students rushed the stage to raise banners protesting the school's decision to force the removal of a residential community (Shao-hsing Community: 紹興社區) based on land owned by the school. The school has the right to remove the residents, but the students were protesting the university's unilateral decision to do so without the courtesy of first negotiating with the residents. The news report suggests that students had been protesting what they see as a the heavy-handedness of yet another bureaucracy supported by tax payer funds.

Disappointing is the NTU president's response, which may be entirely necessary to satisfy the bureaucratic culture's sense of self-importance, but nevertheless suggests a lack of respect for the principles of free speech and civil disobedience in a mature democracy. The university president called the protest "disrespectful" to the university and inappropriately timed. But when can a protest be more effective if not at an important public event? (I remember the English-language China Post which in an editorial and other reportage gleefully encouraged heckling at then-President Chen Shui-bian's public speeches.) The president did have the good grace to note that the student protesters had "good intentions." Perhaps he should praise the protesters for demonstrating a mature understanding of democratic ideals.

It is heartening to see that the protest had some effect, for it brought to public attention an issue that would otherwise have remained private. Three cynical cheers to the NTU bureaucrat (quoted in the China Post report) who managed to blame the government for the school's ruthlessness in sending out eviction notices, while simultaneously making a call for more money from the government. Does this kind of "mei ban fa" (沒辦法) reaction suggest that the student protesters really would have had no option other than to stage a protest that would have the potential of embarrassing the bureaucratic machine into human action?

We in the academic community need to learn a deep respect for protest, knowing that if a large number of intelligent and rational individuals are willing to undertake such a major public action they must be doing so for reasons that far outweigh the ceremonial, symbolic and personal significations of the disrupted public events. Only in a democratic society can David take on Goliath through the exercise of free political speech. How sad that civil society is still so uncivilly skewered that anybody would be forced to resort to these measures.
Source: The China Post (read the full article at The China Post)

Chomsky's Challenge: Multicultural or Monocultural?

Noam Chomsky was in Taiwan for a speaking engagement at Academia Sinica. (Who else has such money to host a big name like Chomsky?) At a news conference after his talk, a local reporter questioned Chomsky about the acceptable age at which children can learn another language.

"It's not a question of linguistics," Chomsky said. "For a young child, language learning is kind of like breathing.

When it was pointed out that some politicians and bureaucrats believed it is harmful for a child to learn English at a young age (does anybody remember then-mayor Ma's opening address to the ETA-ROC conference audience?), Chomsky replied that the question is not one of language, but of social policy. "What kind of society do you want to live in? Do you want to live in a multicultural society or a culturally uniform society?"

Read more about Chomsky's speech at the Taipei Times website.

Research & Teaching: For the Public Good

Research is selfish and leads to a monopolizing of intellectual property by the researcher and the financial backer. Monopolies do not serve society, so they need to be broken. In the world of academia, the monopoly buster is the classroom, where the results of the research effort are distributed for free to the public through students.

This is the key argument of Professor Steve Fuller's opinion piece, "Is Academic Freedom Worth the Price?" (available online at the Taipei Times). And once the original findings of one's research are disseminated to the public through the classroom, the researcher and the financial backer are forced to engage in more research, an effort to keep the selfish monopoly alive.

For universities, therefore, this means "allowing access to knowledge to students who lack the intellectual, political, or financial resources that might have enabled them to produce it for themselves."

Of great relevance to too many professors in Taiwan is Professor Fuller's admonishment that universities can only perform as they were naturally intended to do when academics "speak and write plainly, demystify jargon, present their ideas in alternative media and stress applications to domains that do not concern the academics themselves."

It is a lesson we all need to learn and remember.

China's Blog Censorship is Severe

Censors Delete 95 Percent of Blogs a Day

This item from journalist Amy Nip appeared in the South China Morning Post (June 20, 2010; page 3). It is available online at the RFA blog.

Mainland censors are estimated to delete up to 95 per cent of blog entries posted on the internet every day, according to an academic and veteran blogger.The source? Official data on internet usage released this week.

There are about 220 million bloggers in China, according to a white paper on the internet published by the State Council.

And more than 66 per cent of internet users frequently post, with over 3 million messages posted via BBS, news commentary sites and blogs every day, the paper said.

But Isaac Mao Xianghui, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, told the Asia-Pacific Regional Internet Governance Forum in the city on Thursday that the official number of postings fell far short of what it should be.

Assuming bloggers who post frequently add 0.5 items per day, there should be 72.6 million entries posted daily – not 3 million, he said. “The difference between the two [72.6 million and 3 million] reveals that 95.9 per cent of comments could be deleted during the censorship process,” Mao said.

The surging number of internet users on the mainland is creating a big headache for authorities.

When Mao began blogging in 2002, there were fewer than 1,000 bloggers on the mainland. A year later that number had surged to 100,000.

Content in simplified Chinese characters increased by 124 times between 2002 and 2008, according to a study conducted by Mao.

“Internet users are like rats and the censorship mechanism is a cat. There are too many mice and the cat does not know which one to go after,” Mao said.

Beijing shifted its strategy in 2008 to handle the growing volume of content on the internet. Instead of screening website content, it now blocks sites completely, he said.

About 70,000 sub-domain names – major sessions of a website – are blocked on the mainland, including YouTube, Facebook and Picasa. Several new sites are added to the list every day. But internet users are becoming increasingly familiar with ways to access blocked sites. Savvy bloggers also create duplicates to ensure their writing evades censorship.

Mao said the flood of internet content will likely overwhelm Beijing’s censors by 2014. But he said instead of devoting resources to censorship, the authorities should turn their attention to cyber crime. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s director for Asia-Pacific internet policy, John Galligan, urged governments worldwide to update copyright and privacy protection laws as cross-border data storage gained popularity.

Cloud computing, which lets companies subscribe to software that is accessible through a Web browser, has developed rapidly in recent years. But who owns the information in the cloud – the subscriber or the service provider – has yet to be clearly defined in the international community, said Galligan, who was at the Internet Governance Forum, which was also held in the city. There are still “lots and lots of gaps” as Asian countries move into the digital era, he said.