communication issues, part 1
On Wednesday afternoon, Ma Yingjieou (KMT), mayor of Taipei, publicly ridiculed the Department of Education, Central Government level (DPP), for their lame English. He produced a document—some sort of contract form used by the DOE for international agreements—with his bold red circles around all of its English mistakes. A copy of the contract form with the red circles was published in the major newspapers on Thursday morning. And on Thursday afternoon, as I wandered in dazed from a four hour interview, my boss announced that we were screwed: someone would surely come checking the Taipei City webpages for their own English mistakes, to rebut and re-attack Mayor Ma. So I finally have something to offer the city government. The only frustrating thing is that I’ve already offered it once: I copy-edited the entire English website when I was here last year. Apparently the ‘case,’ as they say here, or project at that point was to “get the English website copyedited,” rather than to “fix the English website,” so my corrections were never entered onto the page and nobody knows what’s happened to them. So I have to do it all over again.
Let it just be said that although it is not the most difficult thing in the world to do, copyediting Chinesified bureaucratic English-language garbage-speak is also not fun, and it has its effects—so don’t be surprised if the style of this blog takes a plunge in the coming days (the current style seems to the result of last night’s last glass of whiskey and getting home at two thirty, don’t mind it).[i] Let it also be said that, although real English mistakes sat within Mayor Ma’s red circles, they are nothing compared to some of the incomprehensible weirdness of our English website. It would have been nice, my boss implied with his short sighs and his rolled eyes, if Mayor Ma had checked on the English situation of the City Government itself before lobbing what is most likely an early shot in the presidential race of 2008, in which none of my coworkers seems interested in participating, perhaps because they are already being required to do so.
For instance, I recently tagged along with a coworker to a meeting entitled “Taipei—Healthy City.” What’s it about, I asked her? “Who knows?” she shrugged. What it’s about is collecting information from every bureau in the city government to see how they are implementing the city-wide policy of making Taipei a Healthy City. Every bureau needs to collect statistics on healthy-city indicators. Although the basic guidelines for what constitute relevant indicators are drawn from the lists put out by the UN and other widely-cited sources, every bureau should decide for itself what policies are relevant. Then it should collect information about the policies and their rates of success as measured in indicators that the bureau decides are relevant to measuring success.
Why are we doing this now? Because Mayor Ma has only two years in office left, and he’d like to have a clear image of what our city’s accomplishments have been and how we can improve it further. “Oh,” whispered my coworker as the speaker explained the situation, “so he wants us to act as his presidential campaign operatives.” It does seem a little unappetizing to have technocrats use their time to retrieve and compile data for use in election propaganda—especially, I guess, since I know these people and have seen how the attrition from the bureau even in the time I’ve been here has left ‘case’ folders piling up higher and higher on everyone’s desks as they take on the projects of their departing colleagues.
But this is not what gets me. What gets me is this.
One of Mayor Ma’s big initiatives has been the “e-city” policy, which has put a huge amount of information and resources online, including application forms for various procedures and so on. City propaganda publications boast that the Taipei City Government is one of the most world-wide-webbed governments in the world, and although I’m not about to go figure out the technical veracity of this statement, I can confirm that there is a lot, lot, lot of information available on the web via the Taipei City Government portal. Some of the stuff is useless or indecipherable (they scan in images of signed new laws rather than uploading the text so you can actually make out what it says; and give a detailed breakdown of city ownership areas by the “section/number” system of ownership registration that nobody outside the city government itself seems to know how to use, without providing any explanation of how to use it or any way to find the “section/number” system corresponding to a normal address); and some of it is nonexistent (occasional links that lead nowhere); and the English sucks pretty much all around, of course, despite all the hoopla about being an “international city,” i.e. accessible to Americans (see above—but the English is purely symbolic anyway, obviously). But despite the occasional confusing entry, the site still offers a hell of a lot of information on city government organization, legal process, and the city itself—maybe even too much, as suggested by a coworker who says she gets confused by our own bureau’s website.
Here’s what the CIA World Factbook has to say about communications in Taiwan. A population that was estimated to be 22,749,838 by July 2004 used a total of 25,089,600 mobile phones (in 2003) plus about 13,355,000 land lines (in 2003). In 2003, there were 2,777,085 internet hosts and 8.83 million internet users. I think it’s fair to say, despite my opinions about how romantic relationships here work, that people in Taiwan generally are capable communicators and communicate at rather high volumes (in both sense of the word, actually). Closer to home, I think I can also safely maintain that the relevant Taipei city government employees are, by international standards, incredibly competent at putting stuff up on the web, and that even the web-irrelevant are at ease in a computer-permeated environment even though they still give things to each other in color-coded folders and write their comments on documents by hand rather than doing it all in track changes and emailing it around. Every document that goes around has to be stamped with the name-chop of all the relevant people who are supposed to see it, with date and time of viewing written by hand across the (rectangular, vertically-oriented) stamp. After the document has gone up to as high a level as it is supposed to, it is returned to the lowly administrator who is actually responsible for the project, and he incorporates everyone’s hand-written changes and directives into his computer file. In other words, although the work of passing files around is done largely in physical formats (presumably for reasons of accountability as well as it being the way it’s always been done—once you stamp something you are responsible for having seen, approved, or modified its contents)[ii]—it does all end up in computer files eventually.
[i] Actually the plunge about to be taken is due not only to the English website corrections and the translation of all bureau project titles that I need to do for the city government this week. I also have to summarize a linguistics dissertation for my teacher who is doing her MA; and I need to proofread the statement of purpose and recommendation letter translations (or inventions) for a friend who is applying to graduate schools in the US; and my friends who are working on the Taipei Internation Documentary Film Festival (to be held in mid-December) finally roped me in to proofing their English-language materials. You don’t need this list of Work I Am Doing, I know. It’s just a little disorienting to suddenly be living All English All the Time—and large parts of it being Bad English.
[ii] One of the biggest jokes of the season, which had several coworkers holding on to their stomachs laughing, was when someone discovered that a section head had stamped an incomplete overtime declaration sheet: someone had applied for overtime pay for a meeting held past work hours, but had neglected to write in the time at which the meeting began and ended. The fact that the section head had stamped it anyway proved what everyone knew, which is that this particular section head does not “use his heart,” is not concentrated on his work.
Let it just be said that although it is not the most difficult thing in the world to do, copyediting Chinesified bureaucratic English-language garbage-speak is also not fun, and it has its effects—so don’t be surprised if the style of this blog takes a plunge in the coming days (the current style seems to the result of last night’s last glass of whiskey and getting home at two thirty, don’t mind it).[i] Let it also be said that, although real English mistakes sat within Mayor Ma’s red circles, they are nothing compared to some of the incomprehensible weirdness of our English website. It would have been nice, my boss implied with his short sighs and his rolled eyes, if Mayor Ma had checked on the English situation of the City Government itself before lobbing what is most likely an early shot in the presidential race of 2008, in which none of my coworkers seems interested in participating, perhaps because they are already being required to do so.
For instance, I recently tagged along with a coworker to a meeting entitled “Taipei—Healthy City.” What’s it about, I asked her? “Who knows?” she shrugged. What it’s about is collecting information from every bureau in the city government to see how they are implementing the city-wide policy of making Taipei a Healthy City. Every bureau needs to collect statistics on healthy-city indicators. Although the basic guidelines for what constitute relevant indicators are drawn from the lists put out by the UN and other widely-cited sources, every bureau should decide for itself what policies are relevant. Then it should collect information about the policies and their rates of success as measured in indicators that the bureau decides are relevant to measuring success.
Why are we doing this now? Because Mayor Ma has only two years in office left, and he’d like to have a clear image of what our city’s accomplishments have been and how we can improve it further. “Oh,” whispered my coworker as the speaker explained the situation, “so he wants us to act as his presidential campaign operatives.” It does seem a little unappetizing to have technocrats use their time to retrieve and compile data for use in election propaganda—especially, I guess, since I know these people and have seen how the attrition from the bureau even in the time I’ve been here has left ‘case’ folders piling up higher and higher on everyone’s desks as they take on the projects of their departing colleagues.
But this is not what gets me. What gets me is this.
One of Mayor Ma’s big initiatives has been the “e-city” policy, which has put a huge amount of information and resources online, including application forms for various procedures and so on. City propaganda publications boast that the Taipei City Government is one of the most world-wide-webbed governments in the world, and although I’m not about to go figure out the technical veracity of this statement, I can confirm that there is a lot, lot, lot of information available on the web via the Taipei City Government portal. Some of the stuff is useless or indecipherable (they scan in images of signed new laws rather than uploading the text so you can actually make out what it says; and give a detailed breakdown of city ownership areas by the “section/number” system of ownership registration that nobody outside the city government itself seems to know how to use, without providing any explanation of how to use it or any way to find the “section/number” system corresponding to a normal address); and some of it is nonexistent (occasional links that lead nowhere); and the English sucks pretty much all around, of course, despite all the hoopla about being an “international city,” i.e. accessible to Americans (see above—but the English is purely symbolic anyway, obviously). But despite the occasional confusing entry, the site still offers a hell of a lot of information on city government organization, legal process, and the city itself—maybe even too much, as suggested by a coworker who says she gets confused by our own bureau’s website.
Here’s what the CIA World Factbook has to say about communications in Taiwan. A population that was estimated to be 22,749,838 by July 2004 used a total of 25,089,600 mobile phones (in 2003) plus about 13,355,000 land lines (in 2003). In 2003, there were 2,777,085 internet hosts and 8.83 million internet users. I think it’s fair to say, despite my opinions about how romantic relationships here work, that people in Taiwan generally are capable communicators and communicate at rather high volumes (in both sense of the word, actually). Closer to home, I think I can also safely maintain that the relevant Taipei city government employees are, by international standards, incredibly competent at putting stuff up on the web, and that even the web-irrelevant are at ease in a computer-permeated environment even though they still give things to each other in color-coded folders and write their comments on documents by hand rather than doing it all in track changes and emailing it around. Every document that goes around has to be stamped with the name-chop of all the relevant people who are supposed to see it, with date and time of viewing written by hand across the (rectangular, vertically-oriented) stamp. After the document has gone up to as high a level as it is supposed to, it is returned to the lowly administrator who is actually responsible for the project, and he incorporates everyone’s hand-written changes and directives into his computer file. In other words, although the work of passing files around is done largely in physical formats (presumably for reasons of accountability as well as it being the way it’s always been done—once you stamp something you are responsible for having seen, approved, or modified its contents)[ii]—it does all end up in computer files eventually.
[i] Actually the plunge about to be taken is due not only to the English website corrections and the translation of all bureau project titles that I need to do for the city government this week. I also have to summarize a linguistics dissertation for my teacher who is doing her MA; and I need to proofread the statement of purpose and recommendation letter translations (or inventions) for a friend who is applying to graduate schools in the US; and my friends who are working on the Taipei Internation Documentary Film Festival (to be held in mid-December) finally roped me in to proofing their English-language materials. You don’t need this list of Work I Am Doing, I know. It’s just a little disorienting to suddenly be living All English All the Time—and large parts of it being Bad English.
[ii] One of the biggest jokes of the season, which had several coworkers holding on to their stomachs laughing, was when someone discovered that a section head had stamped an incomplete overtime declaration sheet: someone had applied for overtime pay for a meeting held past work hours, but had neglected to write in the time at which the meeting began and ended. The fact that the section head had stamped it anyway proved what everyone knew, which is that this particular section head does not “use his heart,” is not concentrated on his work.
posted by blahgstein at 12:43 AM
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