Worried about bits of Franglish/Deutschlish ending up in your translation?
I work with translators to polish their final drafts so everything ends up in perfect, idiomatic English.
It’s been reported extensively elsewhere, but I’ll add my own voice to the joyful chorus: the Cogges Link Road is dead!
The long-anticipated report arising from the public inquiry found that the scheme did not meet the test of “overwhelming public interest” that would have justified compulsory purchase of the land from the Mawle Trust.
We’ve all been there. You’ve found something you want to buy online and you’re happy with the price, so you pop it in your virtual basket and head for the online checkout. It’s all going swimmingly... but you’re not going to be allowed to just buy the item. Oh, no no no. The site asks you to log in. Or perhaps it asks if you’re a new or returning customer. Or perhaps it asks you to register or create an account. Whatever the wording, it’s basically the same demand: before you can buy this item from us, you have to get into an artificial relationship with us.
“Many people who encounter problems with a site tend to blame themselves and not the site.” This insight is just one of the many reasons I love the work of Steve Krug, whose book Don’t Make Me Think! opened my eyes to the concept of usability.
Regular reporting is tough enough to get right – but when you’re covering a crime story involving the sex trafficking of underage girls, it’s a legal and ethical minefield. And that’s before you think about how to handle your relationship with the police. But when the Oxford Mail newsdesk found out about Operation Bullfinch, the police investigation into an Oxford child prostitution ring, reporters rose to the challenge.
I’ve written before about the misguided striving for “balance”.
I wrote recently about the poor reporting of the Cogges Link Road inquiry. Now Oxfordshire County Council have begun work on the road without waiting for the outcome of the inquiry, and the Oxford Mail ran a story on it today after local anti-road campaigners Witney First protested on site yesterday.
Last autumn I spent an unexpected amount of time in Witney Methodist Church. No, I hadn’t suddenly become religious; I was reporting a public inquiry into a local planning issue and the Methodist Church was where it took place.
Last week I asked people to guess what a choice chunk of copywriting was describing. There were a few guesses, but the winner is Christi, who correctly guessed that it was an LED temperature-sensing shower head.
This changes colour from blue to green to red depending on what temperature the shower is. It is a thing of beauty. Thanks to Katie, J-P and Christi.
Unless you’re obsessed with copywriting, it’s easy to forget that packaging blurb has to actually be written by someone. Mostly it’s like incidental music for films – if the consumer is reminded of the creation process, you’re probably doing it wrong. But sometimes it just jumps out at you.
Decluttering, detoxing, rationalising... however you want to put it, January is traditionally a time for taking a look at your life and clearing out some of the rubbish. I usually try to do a bit of decluttering shortly after taking down the Christmas decorations, but I also tend to look again at how I’m spending my time. I want to rid myself of temporal as well as spatial clutter.