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.