Monday, April 8, 2024

A new primary dictionary for the AP Stylebook - Editor And Publisher Magazine - Dictionary

Nicole Meir | The Associated Press

During a panel at the ACES: The Society for Editing national conference in San Diego on Friday, AP Stylebook Editor Paula Froke announced that Merriam-Webster is now the Stylebook’s official dictionary, among other updates. 

The switch to Merriam-Webster is the AP Stylebook’s first change to its primary dictionary in decades. The full changeover will take effect when the AP Stylebook, 57th Edition, is published on May 29. 

Peter Sokolowski, editor at large of Merriam-Webster, joined the ACES session alongside Froke to announce the collaboration. 

Froke also announced new and updated AP Stylebook entries that are now available on AP Stylebook Online. They include:  

  • Expanded guidance on climate change, expanding AP’s use of the term climate crisis and adding new entries including community solar, geothermal, lithium ion, energy transition and hydrogen.  
  • Revised guidance on bulleted lists, saying not to use a period after a single word or a phrase in each item in a list. Do, however, use a period at the end of a complete sentence in a bulleted list.  
  • Consolidation of commonly used prefixes into one prefixes entry, and of commonly used suffixes into one suffixes entry. And a change for consistency: We no longer generally use a hyphen with these prefixes: out-, post-, pre-, re-.   
  • Updated guidance on the terms Native Americans, Indigenous people(s) and American Indians. 

The AP Stylebook is the definitive resource for journalists and a must-have reference for writers, editors, students and professionals. It provides fundamental guidelines for spelling, language, punctuation, usage and journalistic style, and helps writers and editors in all fields navigate complex and evolving language questions. Find AP Stylebook on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and online. 

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Lost in Translation: Unpacking the Shohei Ohtani Scandal - Literary Hub - Translation

There’s an eight-second clip of former baseball superstar Pete Rose making the rounds. He’s out somewhere, maybe a casino in Vegas, where the eighty-two year old now lives, and he looks out from under his ballcap to declare: “Well, back in the 70s and 80s I wish I’d had an interpreter. I’d be scot-free.”

He’s referring to the gambling scandal that exploded last month around Japanese two-way phenom Shohei Ohtani, suggesting the slugger/ace was placing illegal bets with a bookie in California. And that, because he “had an interpreter”—his longtime friend and wingman, Ippei Mizuhara—he was able to wriggle off the hook.

Baseball has set down several bright lines around gambling; to keep the sport away from nefarious characters and organized crime: no bookies or other illegal gambling. (This seems largely moot now that people in 38 states can make bets on their phones and MLB has a contract with FanDuel, but Mizuhara managed to place bets in California, where gambling is still banned.) After the catastrophe of the 1919 Black Sox scandal, clear boundaries were set around betting on baseball. A bet on any game—minor league, college softball, maybe even little league?—could get you a one-year suspension. Your own games? You were banned for life.

Rose, a lifetime gambler and longtime scofflaw of the associating-with-illegal-bookies part of the rulebook, was found to have bet on his own Cincinnati Reds late in his career. For the illegal gambling part he was sent to jail (five months for two counts of filing false income tax returns); for betting on his team, MLB banned him for life.

While he didn’t have much left in the tank in terms of professional play (at that point he was a player-coach in his forties), he also was banned from consideration for election to the Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s hard enough to get into the Hall—it requires 75 percent of voting sportswriters from Baseball Writers’ Association of America to give you the thumbs up—but he was banned from even appearing on the ballot. Rose has spent the last thirty-some years trying to get that decision reversed.

The dimensions of the Ohtani scandal are being sorted—MLB and the feds have tight-lipped investigations underway—but the basics are that his personal interpreter Ippei Mizuhara managed to rack up a purported $4.5 million of gambling debt with an illegal sports bookie in California, and Ohtani made a wire transfer to that man to cover the losses. The complicated, potentially damning situation was made more slippery as the particulars changed again and again: At first Mizuhara said Ohtani had willingly paid off his debts with the transfer; it was a friend helping a friend situation (and Ohtani did not trust Mizuhara, who claimed he bet on soccer, the NBA, NFL, and college basketball, but never baseball, to handle the money himself).

Within hours, the story changed; Mizuhara recanted the helping-hand narrative and said Ohtani didn’t know about the bets; he just sent money from his account. Then Ohtani’s people said he didn’t know about the transfer; what Mizuhara had done was major theft. The sports world got dizzy trying to keep it all straight; it wasn’t helping anything that Ohtani couldn’t answer the English-language press directly.

Was it deception or outright theft or was Mizuhara taking the fall for a player too big to fail? Did Ohtani commit a crime or was his trespass being disorganized with his accounts (he has a $700 million contract with the Dodgers, after all; maybe low-seven figures felt like a drop in the bucket?) or was he only guilty of being too trusting of his long-time translator and friend?

In rooms where nearly no one could do what Mizuhara did—understand both sides of the conversation—the fealty and potential consequence of his interpretation of the situation (and everything else) was quickly thrown into doubt. Had he fully conveyed what Ohtani said on other occasions? Was he giving Ohtani complete information when he translated English information into Japanese? Who is telling—and translating—the truth? (Mizuhara claims he never misled Ohtani with interpreting… just stole a lot of cash.)

Who is telling—and translating—the truth?

There’s a telling account of the Dodgers team meeting that took place—in English—just after the Mizuhara news broke. Ohtani was without a translator but could, he later said, sense something was wrong—even via general vibes he received a more accurate version of events than what he’d been getting from Mizuhara.

And it took little time for Dodgers manager Dave Roberts to start throwing shade in the interpreter’s direction; he called Mizuhara, who was known to not only translate for Ohtani but also carry his backpack and water bottle, a “buffer,” and not in a good way: he was physically and linguistically standing between the Dodgers and their new, most valuable asset. Could it be that Mizuhara was acting as protector and quietly wrecking him, all at once?

Mizuhara’s sudden import was certainly a change of circumstance for interpreters in the MLB. Consider, for a moment, the history of interpreters in the sport. It was only a decade ago, largely because of arrival of another Japanese pitching phenom, Yu Darvish, that MLB changed the rules so that interpreters were allowed not just at press conferences and in the clubhouse, but to join for mound visits.

While it seems obvious and vital that communication be clear in these critical midgame moments—pitchers get mound visits when they’re flagging or otherwise have fucked up and need to talk strategy—for decades foreign-born players made do without. This has something to do with shifting demographics of foreign-born athletes: historically, Spanish-speaking players came to the league as underpaid teens and worked their way up, whereas many of the recent big-name Japanese players transferred into the league after they were already stars at home.

Keith O’Brien talks about this briefly in his new Pete Rose biography, Charlie Hustle (and how convenient that, at the same moment that MLB has to take a hard look at how they enforce their gambling rules, a fairly celebratory portrait of the league’s greatest hitter/worst gambler comes out). Rose came up through the Reds farm system with Cuban-born Tony Perez. During that first minor-league season in Geneva, New York, according to O’Brien, only one of the future All-Star infielders was advocating for himself… because only Rose could communicate.

In Perez’s Hall of Fame webpage (he was inducted in 2000), he speaks of the language barrier during his first season: “I ate chicken for a week one time…. It was the only word I knew—chicken, chicken, chicken.” He certainly didn’t have the convenience of a bilingual valet and body man. (There’s an essay to be written about inequitable distribution of resources among international players; I’ll save that for another day, but share one telling datapoint: it was only in 2016 that MLB required every team have a year-round translator for their Spanish-speaking athletes.)

Clearly we’ve reached a new standing for translation in baseball. Needs that had been discounted for decades are now considered required infrastructure; the fate of a generational talent is tied up with the (mis)performance of his translator. Everyone wants to hear from the interpreter—if only they could find him (no one in the press has seen Mizuhara since he was fired in South Korea on March 20).

Translation’s rise baseball is notable, but hardly sport-specific: something is shifting in culture such that interpreters and translators are popping off all over the place. I realize I’m conflating interpretation and translation here, and understand they are not entirely the same. But some fundamental project of the two practices—bringing ideas from one language to another, facilitating communication—is close enough, I think, for my purposes. We could blame the internet, or globalism, Airbnb and remote work culture and the gentrification of Berlin… sure. But also—what’s going on with the translators, themselves? They’re having a star turn, at, or maybe because of, their entry into an exceedingly perilous moment.

Translation’s rise baseball is notable, but hardly sport-specific: something is shifting in culture such that interpreters and translators are popping off all over the place.

Look at literature, which is finally acknowledging translators’ importance: in 2015 the Booker International Prize shifted its focus to books in translation; three years later the National Book Awards added a category for translated literature. Both author and translator are feted by these prizes, bringing attention to non-Anglophone literature and the art of transmutation, or something like it (Edith Grossman’s term).

There were campaigns (much needed in our overwhelmingly English-first domestic market) to read translated literature, and before long Booker International Prize-winning translator Jennifer Croft was insisting that publishers put translators on the cover. The campaign got some attention: it was the subject of a New York Times article, and even reached the cultural station of being a Jeopardy clue. That none of the contestants even attempted an answer (“What is: Put translators on the cover?”) was maybe a smidge discouraging for translation advocates, but the groundswell was swole.

Another pro-translator development has been a spate of translators-as-people and compelling protagonists in recent literature. Translators weren’t just vital for communication, the small-egoed “always second fiddle” as Margaret Jull Costa calls it, they were interesting humans! In terms of narrative potential, translators were underdogs or underappreciated, though, in their multilingualism, potentially smarter than most people in any given room. What might they do with that power, the agency and potential of having the upper-hand on the neck of that second fiddle? (For Michael Hofmann, the project of translation is “to eclipse the original. It’s like putting the tombstone over a corpse or something. Whatever it is, you bury it.”)

Of course, centering the uncentered but vital role of the translator for the sake of story is not new. Cesar Aira and Samuel Delaney famously wrote about translators decades ago; Borges fictionalized someone translating Don Quijote. Audrey Hepburn got in on the action, playing an interpreter in Paris in the 1963 film Charade. And, lest we forget, in Crime and Punishment, ax-wielding Raskolnikov was a sometimes translator, too.

But there are certainly a lot of characters interested in the task of late: Katie Kitamura has written about translators and interpreters; in her most recent, Intimacies, she said she was interested in how an interpreter “has been trained to think of herself as neutral, as a cog in the machine. But the machine itself isn’t neutral. The institution, its language, none of these things are neutral….Over the course of the novel, she is forced to consider the possibility that [her] position is not especially neutral, and shouldn’t be considered as such.”

Idra Novey’s 2016 debut novel, Ways to Disappear, was, according to Novey, a love letter to the “fascinating, reckless adventure of [translation] as I’d experienced it.” And it happened to be another gambling story: when a Brazilian author, deep in debt, goes missing, her translator gets on the next plane from Pittsburgh with hopes of saving the day. Novey wanted to depict “translators as the passionate risk-takers that so many of the translators I know are.” There are enlightened translators, heroic ones, and sometimes they even go devious.

When Croft turned from translation as practice to subject in her novel The Extinction of Irena Rey, not all the bilingual are saints. While the Rey of the title is the award-winning author who has gathered a gaggle of translators to simultaneously translate her latest work, it is the competitive, ambitious, in-fighting translators who drive the story. (No spoilers, but theft and love triangles and locked doors abound.)

In film and TV, there’s similarly been plenty about translators and cross-cultural communication of late. In the critically acclaimed Anatomy of a Fall, translation is a means to additional income for the German-born novelist Sandra, but translation also is a source of strife: between her and her husband, Samuel, both sides of the unhappy couple have to translate their thoughts into a shared third language to communicate.

Each feels disadvantaged by having to shift their ideas from a first language, but at least it is a means of détente… at least until Samuel falls out of the attic window to his death. Suddenly widow, single mother, and prime suspect, Sandra tries to control the narrative via translation. We, and the prosecutor, suspect selective omission, maybe some intentional mis-interpretation of sticky words and phrases.

And when she claims she’s reached the limits of her own capacity for bilingualism—she stops translating herself and switches from French to English—we’re left to wonder, is that true or is it convenient? The translator, meant to be flawless and true in their execution of language across tongues, has a bigger concern than linguistic fealty: self-preservation.

Before I mentioned translation’s exceeding peril, even as the artform gains due prominence. Because, like so many facets of culture that are being reimagined by tech, translation is facing an existential crisis and potential, or partial obsolescence. AI has advanced sufficiently that, as of last fall, podcasts can be translated into different languages and replayed in a deep-fake version of the podcaster’s voice. It seems, to me, both terrifying and very handy that you can listen to the latest Hard Fork in French, but also markedly less scary than Elon Musk’s plans for Neuralink, a computer chip implant company that he says will make human language obsolete in less than a decade (his clock started in 2021).

Of course, even as some audiences will reach for AI or brain-implants, other readers will forever want the artfulness and inefficiency of the human touch. (Also, an AI interpreter won’t carry your backpack for you.) But with translation, as opposed to other fields facing a transformational shift with AI, there’s another wrinkle or rub. Because in regards to translation, the audience gets to weigh in about how they receive language—whether they’ll patiently wait for the next Margaret Jull Costa translation or if they’d rather put a book through Google translate. And the original speaker/authors has agency, too, about who they want to work with and why.

It’s the middleman, the translator, who doesn’t have as much self-determination in this equation, as reliant as they are on receiving someone else’s words and needing a waiting audience to receive them. The person in the middle is inherently disadvantaged, at least until they step up and speak up, and potentially, go off script.

Mizuhara’s situation is a case in point: only when he began behaving badly, creating rifts in the otherwise seamless, all-but-invisible role of the interpreter, did people start paying attention to him. Whether his attention-seeking actions were intended take down a great ballplayer—or take a fall for him, as Pete Rose suggested—will come out eventually. Because even as audiences think translators are there to serve, translators know better. As Croft puts it, in writing Irena Rey, “I wanted to show how much power translators have.”

Emily Nemens

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Sunday, April 7, 2024

The Christopher Luxon dictionary of corporate speak - The Spinoff - Dictionary

An operationalised, strategically aligned, actionable guide to the phraseology of prime minister Christopher Luxon.

The prime minister loves business jargon. Luxon’s 36-point action plan is full of pledges to “take decisions” and “raise the energy”. But his media team is slowly beating that instinct out of him, and it’s a real shame.

It’s cute seeing Luxon embrace his true self. Corporate speak makes him feel comfortable, it reminds him of his young, carefree days at the University of Canterbury business school, where he provided operational efficiencies in beer pong and accelerated leveraged opportunities on the dancefloor.

Like all politicians, sometimes Luxon’s corporate speak is just word-salad. But sometimes, our prime minister is actually trying to communicate with us. He just forgets normal people don’t spend their spare time reading books with titles like Seven Steps to Synergising Success because, well, they are normal people. It’s a sad sight, like a baby desperately trying to tell its parents what it needs, but it doesn’t quite have the words. 

Out of pity, we compiled a guide to some of Luxon’s favourite bits of business school jargon, what they mean, and where he probably learned them. 

Chunk it down 

Example: “You still have to chunk it down and actually execute components on it.” – Luxon on government reforms. 

Definition: To break a larger project or goal into smaller tasks. 

Origin: Like most business school jargon, this sounds like a common-sense phrase that has probably existed forever, but Luxon almost certainly learned the phrase from the 2004 book The Success Principles: How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Jack Cranfield

Big rocks

Example: “We need to elevate up and say, ‘Well, what are the big rocks and the additive things that actually the other parties are bringing to our agenda?” – Luxon on the coalition negotiations. 

Definition: Big rocks are your priorities. It’s part of an analogy about filling a jar with rocks. If you put the big rocks in first, you can still fit the smaller rocks around them. But if you fill it with small rocks first, you’ll never be able to fit the big rocks. 

Origin: The big rocks analogy was popularised by the 1989 self-help book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey. 

Nicola Willis and Christopher Luxon on the campaign trail promising to get us back on track.(Image: Getty Images)

Deliverables 

Example: “We are looking ahead to actually deliver a set of deliverables that will help our vision of New Zealand to take root and come to pass.” – Luxon’s instructions to his MPs at their 2024 annual retreat. 

Definition: Deliverables are the things that must be delivered throughout a project. It includes the final product, but also things like reports, updates and prototypes that need to be prepared along the way. 

Origin: One of the earliest examples of the term is from the Work Breakdown Structure, a “deliverable-oriented” method of project management developed in 1962 by the US Department of Defense.

Operationalising 

“We are operationalising our government.” – Luxon, on operationalising the government. 

Definition: No, it doesn’t just mean making the government operate. In science, operationalisation means to take a vague concept and try to define it with measurable observations. For example, personality differences are vague, and the Meyers-Briggs test is an attempt to operationalise them. In business and government it’s about trying to create standardised, repeatable processes even for big, vague goals (like getting our mojo back). 

Origin: The idea of operationalism was coined in the 1927 book The Logic of Modern Physics by Percy Williams Bridgman, and eventually spread to the social sciences and business schools. 

Core competency

Example: “We’ve got to focus on what our core competency is and what our advantages are and what we can actually do to help.” Luxon, on New Zealand’s involvement in the war in Ukraine. 

Definition: The attributes that make a person or company stand out from the competition. For example, Luxon’s core competencies are his business experience and saying words like “core competencies”. 

Origin: First used in the 1990 book The Core Competence of the Corporation by C.K. Prahalad and Gary Hamel.

Value chain

Example: “We don’t generate enough value from what we do because we can’t get ourselves up the value chain to generate higher-value products and services.” – Luxon, on the quality of education in New Zealand. 

Definition: The value chain is the process by which a raw product becomes more valuable and therefore more profitable. Chopping down a tree is at the bottom of the value chain. Then, someone adds value by cutting it into timber, and someone else creates even more value by turning that timber into a house. 

Origin: The term “value chain” was first introduced in the 1985 book Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance by Michael Porter.

Luxon after saying some of these words, presumably (Photo: Fiona Goodall/Getty Images)

Results-driven 

Example: The coalition government will make decisions that are… results-driven. Interventions that aren’t delivering results will be stopped.” – Coalition agreement between National and Act. 

Definition: Managing an organisation based on achieving outcomes, rather than being overly focused on adhering to strategies or processes. 

Origin: The concept of results-driven management is most often credited to the 1954 book, The Practice of Management by Peter Drucker, though he referred to it as “management by objectives”. 

Benchmarking 

Example: A big part of that is to know whether you’re actually benchmarking your performance and knowing whether you are or are not hitting the mark and doing the right thing.” – Luxon on whether councils should have to do audits. 

Definition: To set a specific standard that you can be measured against. It might be better for a business to benchmark itself against its competitors, rather than just looking at overall sales. 

Origin: A benchmark was originally a form of survey marker, chiseled in stone to form a bench for a levelling rod, so the measurement could be accurately repeated in the future. It reached the business world in 1979 when Xerox undertook benchmarking studies to compare itself to its competitors. It was popularised by the 1989 book Benchmarking: The Search for Industry Best Practices that Lead to Superior Performance by Bob Camp. 

Key Performance Indicators

Example: Luxon has publicly said he would set KPIs for other National Party MPs.

Definition: KPIs are commonly used in the corporate world to measure whether an employee is doing a good job, especially if their work can’t be directly linked to a financial result. 

Origin: Key Performance Indicators as a concept have existed for basically all of human history, but the phrase was popularised among business nerds by the 1996 book The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action by Dr. Robert Kaplan and Dr. David Norton.

Mission creep 

“Fundamentally, there has been mission creep with the Reserve Bank.” – Luxon on the Reserve Bank’s dual mandate. 

Definition: Mission creep refers to when an organisation’s mission becomes broader and vaguer over time, until they lose sight of what they were originally meant to be doing. 

Origin: The first recorded use of the phrase is in a 1993 Washington Post column by Jim Hoagland about the battle of Mogadishu – “Beware ‘mission creep’ in Somalia. It quickly became a common phrase in the military and business world. 

Decision gates 

Example: “You take those big topics and you chunk them down by decision gates as well through the quarter.” – Luxon on his second quarterly action plan. 

Definition: Decision gates are part of a model of product development called the Stage Gate process. It breaks down the process into five phases, from idea to launch. Between each phase is a “gate” where you have to decide whether to continue the project, modify or scrap it. 

Origin: First introduced in the 1988 article Stage-gate Systems: A New Tool for Managing New Products by Robert G. Cooper.

Gates of implementation 

Example: “It’s just making sure that as we go through the gates of implementation of different decisions that we’re taking, that we’re actually consciously working, moving forward.” – Luxon on his government’s action plan. 

Definition: Once you have passed through the decision gates, I guess there are another set of gates where you implement things? 

Origin: Gates of implementation does not appear to be a thing. As far as I can tell, no one has ever said these words before. Is this the title of Christopher Luxon’s future business bestseller?

This dictionary will be updated as new vocabulary is introduced.

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Found in translation - CBC News - Translation

In June 2003, Tracy and Len Eyre were newly engaged and walking blissfully along one of the many rocky beaches of B.C.’s Haida Gwaii archipelago when Len noticed something on the shore.

It was a brown glass bottle with a plastic lid on it, around the size of a peanut butter jar.

Inside were a few letters with Japanese text neatly written on lined paper surrounded by pictures of flowers, fruit and cartoon characters.

“My first thought was that, ‘Oh, this is probably somebody that lives about three or four miles down the beach [that] threw this in the water,’” Len said, recalling the initial discovery.

“It was a bit of a shock to open it up and see that everything was dry and intact and that it all was in Japanese characters … ‘Wow, we actually found something really quite, quite exciting here.’”

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Found in translation - CBC News - Translation

In June 2003, Tracy and Len Eyre were newly engaged and walking blissfully along one of the many rocky beaches of B.C.’s Haida Gwaii archipelago when Len noticed something on the shore.

It was a brown glass bottle with a plastic lid on it, around the size of a peanut butter jar.

Inside were a few letters with Japanese text neatly written on lined paper surrounded by pictures of flowers, fruit and cartoon characters.

“My first thought was that, ‘Oh, this is probably somebody that lives about three or four miles down the beach [that] threw this in the water,’” Len said, recalling the initial discovery.

“It was a bit of a shock to open it up and see that everything was dry and intact and that it all was in Japanese characters … ‘Wow, we actually found something really quite, quite exciting here.’”

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Saturday, April 6, 2024

Google Translate No Longer Needs Humans to Improve Translations - Slator - Translation

Google Translate has shelved its human feedback tool called Contribute. The Contribute feature allowed users to click a button to “improve this translation”, and write an alternative translation.

When the feature launched in 2014, Google said that Contribute would help to “incorporate your corrections and over time learn your language a little better.”

Google acknowledged the importance of Contribute to the development of Translate, saying “with your help, we’ve been able to add new languages and improvements over the years. Since then, our systems have significantly evolved, allowing us to phase out Contribute.”

However, users can still send feedback to Google, by rating the translation “good” or “poor”, and selecting why a translation may be poor from a select list of options.

Adam Bittlingmayer, CEO of ModelFront and former Google Translate engineer, told Slator that while “search, ads, videos or social feeds [have] successfully used human feedback loops at scale since the 2000s, […] so far, in translation, we’ve failed to use human feedback despite leading on model architecture.”

“The best feedback is incidental and just built into how every user uses the product”, he added.

10 LLM Use Cases (Main Title)

Slator Pro Guide: Translation AI

The Slator Pro Guide presents 10 new and impactful ways that LLMs can be used to enhance translation workflows.

The news has already generated some concern with Google Translate contributors. One volunteer, who contributed to improving Fulfulde — a Senegambian language spoken by approximately 36.8 million people — questioned if their efforts had gone to waste alongside other under-represented or long-tail languages in the tool: 

“As of 23rd March 2024, the language has reached a total of 52,600 contributions. This shows that the language has many dedicated people who are willing to promote and revive it; they don’t want their language to instinct”, added the user.

Google has recently touted its commitment to low-resource language translation in a different setting. Google’s AI Chief highlighted Gemini 1.5 Pro’s success in “learning” Kalamang, described as having “fewer than 200 speakers and therefore virtually no presence on the web.”

Hat tip to the Search Engine Journal for first covering the story.

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Friday, April 5, 2024

Gold standard UK HE lost in translation - Times Higher Education - Translation

In the West we talk about decolonising the curriculum, but invariably regard our educative model as superior when we export it to new overseas ventures. But senior UK university staff rarely visit these ventures and typically don’t want to hear that the education delivered can be a long way from the UK Professional Standards Framework.

Do outstanding global partnerships exist? Yes, I’ve seen them. In others, though, what you get is departments full of colleagues from the host country who think locally and are not particularly familiar with UK standards, practices and language. Nevertheless, as colonisers, we force them, and the students, to teach and learn in English, inviting miscommunication. At the same time, we do not require international staff to learn local languages.

Meanwhile, it risks our quality assurance when local peers regularly mark a piece of coursework 89 out of 100. Joint-venture degree outcomes get UK moderated, but at a distance, and with overworked UK moderators checking perhaps a 10 per cent sample. Each piece of degree-awarding coursework marked overseas should be fully moderated to ensure fairness and consistency.

Nor can we ignore the fact that some countries we partner in have different ideas about human rights. Authoritarian settings rely on rote pedagogy, and abhorrent academic abuse, violence and imprisonment are reported locally as commonplace. Even a simple email from the UK to guide staff at a partnership in an authoritarian setting will probably look different when it reaches them. We encourage graduate students to find their voices – yet, if they do so, they might vanish, accused of subverting state power.

There are other huge cultural differences, particularly in Asia, where UK partnerships operate. Ideological indoctrination might be considered an appropriate aim of curricula. A supervisor’s authority is typically absolute and their political orientation means everything. Politically motivated, deranged academic appointments, usually professorships, are popular concessions. Face-culture, filial piety and excessive deference to power dominate.

I attended one event where students crawled on their knees to prostrate themselves before tutors. And I’ve seen students rehearse graduating for many hours, from 3am in the morning, in tropical heat; those “allowed” to identify as women had to wear short skirts and make-up.

Professional expectations of staff are also very different. First-year, inexperienced postdocs can supervise UK PhD students as lead supervisors, having never studied UK PhDs themselves. Departments can launch new degrees yearly, despite being in their academic infancy. Predatorial academics abound; overseas, I was once asked by a peer if it was “OK” to publish students’ dissertation work as their own.

The working day in Asia is long – up to 12 hours – and the working week is typically six days. During it, you embrace a culture of absolute service to your line manager. I know of one doctoral supervisor taking meetings while in labour. Another colleague nearly broke when a female jobseeker was discounted because she was unmarried. Faculty turnover rates are high for a reason.

UK university leaders’ knowledge shortfall of this landscape is glaring. The realities often don’t come across in long-distance partnership video calls. Assurances about standards often belie the realities. And abuse of power by ultra-conservative, state-aligned actors is waved away as cross-cultural misunderstanding.

We should not abandon our partnerships, but we should rethink them. Better training for those charged with monitoring them is imperative. Our business agreements must contractually protect curricula, libraries and lectures from political interference. Local staff need pensions, protections and professional training. And we need to make it a matter of business practice that overseas leadership teams are diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and nationality to avoid ritualistic conformity.

Overseas practice also requires regular scrutiny by impartial UK regulatory bodies. We cannot rely on institutional ethics for accountability in the face of such strong market forces.

Western academic practice might not be objectively better than any other and has flaws. Yet if we are asking students to pay for a Western degree at a distance the least we can do is deliver it to Western standards, built on post-war intellectual values we are supposed to champion.

For UK universities to take their money without sufficient concern about whether they receive what they are paying for is the worst form of academic colonialism.

Michael Day is an associate professor in HE teaching and learning at the University of Greenwich.

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