The translator vs the interpreter

John le Carre, writing in his novel The Mission Song, makes this useful distinction between something ordinary in the business of dealing with words and something quite extraordinary, even magical:

Never mistake, please, your mere translator for your top interpreter. An interpreter is a translator, true, but not the other way around. A translator can be anyone with half a language skill and a dictionary and a desk to sit at while he burns the midnight oil: pensioned-off Polish cavalry officers, underpaid overseas students, minicab drivers, part-time waiters and supply teachers, and anyone else who is prepared to sell his soul for seventy quid a thousand. He has nothing in common with the simultaneous interpreter sweating it out through six hours of complex negotiations. Your top interpreter has to think as fast as a numbers boy in a coloured jacket buying financial futures. Better sometimes if he doesn't think at all, but orders the spinning cogs on b0th sides of his head to mesh together, then sits back and waits to see what pours out of his mouth.

For The Guardian's review of The Mission Song, click here.

For The New York Times' review, go here.

For le Carre's official website, visit this.

New monument honours slain journalists

A new monument in London pays tribute to the hundreds of journalists killed in the course of their jobs.

According to Democracy Now!, the daily TV/radio news programme, which airs on over 700 stations, mainly in the US, an estimated two war journalists have died every week over the past ten years. The latest victim is Iraqi journalist Muhieddin Abdul-Hamid. He was killed Tuesday in a drive-by shooting soon after he left his home in Mosul.

According to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, the 32-foot-high glass sculpture atop the BBC broadcasting house in London was unveiled by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Monday, following the recent deaths of the two BBC journalists, Abdul Samad Rohani and Nasteh Dahir Faraah, in Afghanistan and Somalia. The memorial, which will shine a light into the sky every night, is dedicated not only to journalists, but also to those working with them, including translators and drivers.

Rodney Pinder, director of the International News Safety Institute, told Democracy Now!: "This kilometre-high beam of light will shine every night in the center of one of the biggest cities in the world. So it brings attention to thousands, and over the years, if not millions, of people who will see this light and will ask what it’s about. So it brings attention to an issue that has been so widely ignored or not known about for so many years. The numbers of news media professionals, journalists and their support staff who are killed trying to do their job of shining light in the dark recesses of society, not just in wars, but in peacetime, often in their own countries. This has not been known, and the numbers have been rising year after year since the millennium. So this focuses international attention on what is a grave blight in all our democratic societies."

Read the rest of the interview broadcast at
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/6/18/new_monument_honors_slain_journalists

Indonesia's old radio hands decry falling standards

Old radio hands reunite, fault gap in foreign language skills

According to a report in The Jakarta Post, former radio announcers of the Voice of Free Indonesia (VOFI) have criticized contemporary announcers for their low proficiencies in foreign languages, especially English.

"They must improve their language skills because the radio programs are broadcast all over the world," Zuraida "Ida" Rosihan Anwar said here Monday.

"Most announcers used to speak more than one foreign language like Dutch, English, French and German, fluently. Today, I see current announcers have limited capacity to speak foreign languages. They should train more," said Ida, who speaks English and Dutch.

Ida, 84, was one of the VOFI's first announcers.

She was speaking at a talk show to celebrate the spirit of independence in conjunction with the radio station's 62nd anniversary with several of her former colleagues.

The VOFI broadcast in four languages -- Dutch, English, French and Indonesian. It took part in boosting the spirit of the nation in the struggle to defend the country's independence, and could be heard in countries as far away as Europe.

In 1950, the VOFI became a part of the Voice of Indonesia, or Suara Indonesia, the international program of the state-owned radio broadcasting station Radio Republik Indonesia (RRI).

Today, the VOI broadcasts 24 hours a day (14 hours through terrestrial and Internet programming, with 10 hours on radio Internet only) in 10 languages -- Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Indonesian, Korean, Malay and Spanish.

OJR winds up website

After a decade, the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication has decided to cease publication of the website, Online Journalism review (OJR). In his final post at OJR, Robert Niles said that the archives will remain online, but there will be no new articles. He continued:

"One of OJR's goals over the years has been to help mid-career journalists make a successful transition from other media to online reporting and production. I'm pleased to say that USC Annenberg will continue to provide support in that area, through the Knight Digital Media Center. I encourage OJR readers to click over to the KDMC website and its blogs, if you are not already a regular reader there.

The decision to close OJR means that I have left the University of Southern California. But I am not going offline. I will continue to write, daily, about new media and journalism at my new website, SensibleTalk.com. I hope that many of you will click over and visit me there.

Finally, on behalf of OJR, I want to thank you. Thank you for your readership, tips, corrections, kind words and support. And I want to wish you success as you work to build engaging, informative and sustainable websites, to better serve your audiences.

So... in that spirit, I suppose that I will borrow a classic sign-off from the world of journalism, one that's been borrowed by another recently:

Good night, and good luck.

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/people/robert/200806/1515/

Indians taking over Britain?

Lord Archer: ‘Indians are the new Jews and are taking over Britain’

Touring India to promote his latest book, Tory peer Lord Jeffrey Archer proclaimed that Indians are the ‘new Jews’ of Britain, that Indian businessmen are ‘taking over’ Britain and that Indian mayors and councillors are taking over local government throughout the country.

Britain will one day day be ruled by an Indian prime minister, Archer added in a television interview staged in a glitzy new shopping mall near Delhi. “It is going to be taken over by Indians, and I don’t joke,” he said.

“Now what you [Indians] are doing is what the Jews did 30-40 years ago when the came to England after the war. They took over the local councils and they became mayors. Now they are in Parliament. The Indians are now taking over the local councils. There are mayors all over England who are Indian."

According to a post in AlterMedia, Archer's comments came in the wake of a number of Indian takeovers of major British companies, such as Jaguar, Land Rover, Corus Steel and the Scottish whisky giant Whyte and Mackay.

The Empire Writes Back

Randeep Ramesh, writing in The Guardian on 9 June 2008, tells us that "when the Times of India broke the story that it had bought Virgin Radio for £53m last weekend, it marked the first foreign takeover by an Indian media company. The paper's headline read: "Voice of India will now be heard all over London."

The world's largest-circulation newspaper was founded to support the Raj's interest in western India 170 years ago, and the old lady of Boribunder has revelled in the role of reverse colonialist.

For more, visit http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jun/09/pressandpublishing.radio

India, world's 2nd largest newspaper market

Looks like more people in Asia read newspapers than in the rest of the world. Guess which is the country with the largest number of newspapers? China. And No.2? India. No. 3? Japan. Seventy-four of the world's 100 best-selling dailies are published in Asia. India, China and Japan account for 62 of them.

According to latest research by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), the four largest markets for newspapers are: China, with 107 million copies sold daily; India, with 99 million copies daily; Japan, with 68 million copies daily; and the United States, with nearly 51 million.

Growing literacy and new technology have resulted in India emerging as the second largest newspaper market in the world. Indian newspaper sales increased 11.2 per cent in 2007 and 35.51 per cent in the five year period. Newspaper advertising revenues in India were up 64.8 per cent over the previous 5 years.

The research found that newspapers are facing hard times, but circulations worldwide increased by 2.57 per cent in 2007, taking global daily sales to a new high of over 532 million copies.

The global paid-for circulation rose 2.57 per cent year on year and 9.39 per cent over the past five years. However, when free dailies were added to paid-for daily circulation, global circulation increased by 3.65 per cent year on year to 573 million copies.

Free dailies now account for nearly 7 per cent of all global newspaper circulation. Print remains the world's largest advertising medium, with a 40 per cent share.

Timothy Balding, chief executive officer of WAN said "Newspaper circulation has been rising or stable in three-quarters of the world's countries over the past five years and in nearly 80 per cent of countries in the past year. And even in places where paid-for circulation is declining, notably the US and some countries in western Europe, newspapers continue to extend their reach through a wide variety of free and niche publications."

WAN, the global organisation for the newspaper industry, defends and promotes press freedom and the professional and business interests of newspapers world-wide. For more on WAN, visit http://www.wan-press.org/index.php3

Are book reviews in newspapers dead?

The incredible vanishing book review

Writing in the online magazine Salon, Kevin Berger, the executive editor of San Francisco magazine, feels that in the age of market research, newspaper editors have decreed that their readers just don't care about books.

He writes of ''the Chronicle's action, two months earlier, to do away with its pullout, 12-page book section and demote book reviews to the back of its Sunday entertainment section, a tabloid called Datebook. The book editor at the time, David Kipen, was shifted to "book critic," responsible for reviewing two books per week, and Oscar got the job of overseeing Sunday's seven book pages, which now fall between "Dining Out" and "Get Together," the personals.

''The Chronicle's Sunday circulation is a little over half a million, making it the most widely read paper in the Bay Area. And it's not the only metropolitan daily to trim its book coverage this year. The Seattle Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Boston Globe have all put their papers on a diet by cutting back on book reviews. Even the nation's most influential Sunday book supplement, the New York Times Book Review, killed two pages, resulting in the loss of six "In Brief" write-ups and one full-page review.

''The reason for the cuts is not exactly front-page news. In our "age of corporate newspapering," as the American Journalism Review calls it, the $60 billion-a-year newspaper industry is "now culminating in a furious, unprecedented blitz of buying, selling, and consolidating of newspapers."

Read more, at Salon: http://archive.salon.com/books/feature/2001/07/19/book_reviews/print.html

Merchants of Trivia by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone

Why do the media insist on reducing one of the most exciting presidential primary seasons in American history to a simple horse race?

December 28th, a beastly-cold afternoon in Story City, Iowa. Another school gym full of polite, placard-bearing Iowans herded in to support yet another pomp-and-ceremony-promising presidential candidate, in this case Hillary Clinton.

Hillary's late, however, so the campaign decides to pass the time by sending a pair of central-casting Adorable Local Children onstage to chuck HILLARY '08 T-shirts into the crowd. A young Hillary volunteer in a standard-issue Pale Blue Button-Down Shirt (the mandatory uniform of all campaign volunteers) takes the mike to introduce the kids.

"There's something you should know about these two," Pale Blue Shirt shouts. "They only respond to NOISE!!! Whoever makes the most noise gets a T-shirt!"

Robotic cheers as the kids hurl shirts in every direction. Last time I saw this act, it was New Jersey Nets mascot Sly the Silver Fox shooting tees with a slingshot to "Who Let the Dogs Out" during halftime at the Meadowlands. This time, the soundtrack is Tom Petty's nauseatingly Hillary-specific "American Girl." Some reporters are rolling their eyes, but every camera is dutifully following each flying T-shirt.

"Make sure you get that," a TV guy to my left whispers to his cameraman.

"Got it, got it," the camera guy says.

There must be a hundred reporters here, and every last one has lined up to capture this event in all its stage-managed glory. There are two camera risers, both packed to the gills with network shooters. Hillary's lectern is planted squarely between two enormous American flags; this way, every shot is sure to make her look like George C. Scott in Patton, with every curve of her ample jowls bathed in the iconic stripes of Old Glory. Campaigns pay top dollar for such images in commercials, but the free press literally fights for space on the risers, for the right to transmit those juicy images for free.

And when Hillary finally arrives, her speech turns out to be the same maddeningly nonspecific, platitude-filled verbal oatmeal that every candidate has spent the last year slinging in all directions — complete with the same vague promises for "change" we've heard from every last coached-up dog in this presidential hunt, from Barack Obama to Mitt Romney.

For the rest of the story, please go to http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/17977692/merchants_of_trivia

'Shocking' Truths by Will Dana in Rolling Stone

The star of the anti-globalization movement returns with a new book that explains Bush's real agenda

What do 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and 2004's Southeast Asian tsunami — not to mention countless earthquakes, floods and pretty much any kind of havoc global warming might cause — have in common? If you are a normal person, you might say "untold human suffering." But that wouldn't make you a very good neocon. In her new book, The Shock Doctrine, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein rips apart the big lies and secret agendas of the Bush administration to show how the opportunists at the helm of American power have used misery and disaster as a cover for extending U.S. economic hegemony, abrogating human rights and shredding our own Constitution. It's a chilling, important book, and anyone who wants to understand how the world really works — not to mention how the war on terrorism has made the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney extremely wealthy men — should read it immediately.

For more, visit http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/17478636/shocking_truths

Useful resources for infomaniacs

Listed on this page are some of the best resources (almost all free) that you can find on the Internet that relate to journalism in all its avatars -- traditional print, audiovisual, online...

Please hang on for some good content on writing well, writing concisely and being an exemplary journalist...