The article is datelined Zurich (sic; the place properly spells its name “Zürich”), and most details about this supposed pan-European conspiracy against the automobile do come from out of that city. But now Zürich has caught notice and offers a reply, in the form of this editorial by Martin Meyer in its flagship newspaper, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, for which the headline writer – probably not Meyer himself – latches onto the available racy double-meaning to craft the snappy title “Zürich, Red-Light District.”

Goodness sakes – to paraphrase the way Meyer starts out his piece – Zürich is front-page news on the International Herald Tribune*! How come? Why, it’s because of the “torture” (Folter) we impose on our drivers! Making them stop repeatedly at deliberately-unsynchronized red lights! Slowing them down to a snails’ pace – when they’re allowed at all – near main city squares! He remarks on the behutsam empörte Verblüffung (“circumspectly indignant bewilderment”) of Ms. Rosenthal’s writing-tone, saying that “like Gulliver in the Land of the Giants, she gradually submits to a morality that, in the name of a philosophical superiority, knows what is right and what is wrong.”

Then again – is Zürich truly in the avant-garde when it comes to “transforming cold asphalt on-the-move into blooming zones of [pedestrian] comfort”? as Meyer asks elsewhere. His civic modesty here is touching, but he also has a real point: other European cities would have made better case studies. (You have to pay just to drive into Oslo, for example, or into London for that matter!) In other words, there was really no need for Zürich to gain this minor, but still probably undesired international notoriety in the eyes of the IHT’s/NYT’s affluent, influential readers.

* Yes, it’s strange that Meyer mentions the IHT when in reality Ms. Rosenthal’s article originated with the New York Times, which provides most of the IHT’s content! Was it just a mistake, or can it really be that the IHT name still carries more prestige in European circles?

                          

It’s often pretty funny stuff. Then again, another thought may come to anyone inclined to think about such things a bit more deeply. (And/or to those quick to take offense – or are these two cohorts actually one-and-the-same?) Could it be that the “paper of record” of one great civilization is, in effect, mocking the citizens of yet another for their well-intentioned struggles in navigating the former’s language? When, in fact, relations between these two great civilizations are of possibly the most crucial importance to world peace as well as progress on most other global-scale problems (e.g. environment, trade, financial regulation)?

Maybe, but maybe not. As esteemed as the NYT is, it still needs to attract paying readers and satisfy them with informative, entertaining articles and (on its website, of course) slide-shows, so it could hardly have turned these articles down. Anyway, “Chinglish” is not some new discovery – there are websites devoted to the subject, after all. And finally, here’s some fresh proof that this sort of sly mutual rib-digging among insiders (that is, native-speakers) at others’ mistakes is just a natural human inclination: the Germans do it too! Bitte sehr, I give you a new on-line article-with-embedded slide-show from Die Welt featuring comic attempts at translation into German, with often some really wise-ass accompanying commentary, much worse than the Times. On the other hand, these mostly have nothing to do with the Chinese – and sometimes they have nothing to do with German, or indeed any language, but are simply funny signs. Nonetheless, it’s an entertaining diversion, especially for, but not only for, German-speakers.

(Oh yes, and this post’s title is of course derived from Chinglish, specifically from an entry within this Flickr photo-stream – yet another permanent Chinglish site – where a bag of Lay’s potato-chips is labeled in Chinese and in English with the tag “Numb & Spicy Hot Pot Flavor”!)

UPDATE: And now the NYT has another Chinglish slideshow made up of reader submissions!

                          

As you might expect, the growing capability of machine translation (with the translation facilities provided for free by Google in the vanguard) presents me with a number of fairly challenging questions. Did I simply waste all that time of my past, of my precious youth, learning the various languages that I claim to be able to use at present? (And am I wasting it now as I continue to study others? I’m afraid I can’t stop myself.) Are the translation assignments I occasionally get to earn a bit of money fated to dry up? Is there indeed any point anymore to a weblog supplying “Commentary on the European non-English-language press” when anyone can now plug any given article into Google Translate and read it? (I still don’t believe that last part is actually true.) With these worries in the back of your mind, you expectantly click on an article like I, Translator, one that purports to defend human translation and foreign language capabilities, hoping for a encouraging ego-boost for the home team, for your side, for those who master foreign languages the old-fashioned way. I mean, hey, this is from a Princeton guy!

Did anyone else suffer as bitter a sense of disappointment at what the article actually turned out to say as I did? As for you, Mr. Bellos – Did it have to be so hard? All you needed to do was provide a convincing listing (and explanation) of machine translation’s disadvantages vis-à-vis human translation, maybe with a few disadvantages in the other direction thrown in at the end to preserve an even-handed, judicious aura. What we got instead was almost the opposite. Machine translation (although from Carnegie-Mellon, not Google) saved lives in the Haitian earthquake! Google should be OK “for maybe 95 percent of all utterances,” probably even for use in translating lower-quality literature that “employ[s] only repeated formulas” in its language.

Damn, Mr. Bellos, you’ve given away most of the store by this point; what’s left, if anything, that human translators would be able to do better? True “literary translation” is what’s left, “works that are truly original – and therefore worth translating,” although even then “human beings have a hard time of it, too,” i.e. will still be liable to get things wrong. Gee, thanks. Of course, three paragraphs previously we already learned that there’s no need to use machines for literary translations anyway, since there are more than enough humans ready to do that work. Bellos seems to lose sight of the fundamental consideration that, although there are more than enough human translators available, all or most of them will demand to be paid for the work, while machines will not.

Add in the various other sloppy elements here – “two important limitations” to statistical machine translation are announced, but it’s never clear what the second one is; there’s a brief history given of machine translation, but one of doubtful relevance especially when space is at a premium in a high-profile column like this – and one comes to the end desperately hoping that Bellos did actually deliver a convincing treatment of the whole translation question but that it fell victim to brutal disfigurement at the hands of a human editor prior to publication. (It does not seem to have been fact-checked, in any case; see the appended error correction about Warren/William Weaver.) As it stands, with public advocates like this, those of us who remain exponents (and practicers) of human translation certainly stand in no need of any more detractors.

                          

Now we read on-line in the New York Times (Cost Dispute Halts Airlift of Injured Haiti Quake Victims) how US authorities have stopped evacuations of critically-injured Haitian earthquake victims to American hospitals because of a dispute about who will pay for their care. One doctor in charge of a nonprofit foundation assisting in Haitian relief efforts is quoted as calling this delay potentially catastrophic for these sufferers.

Ladies and Gentleman, I give you: Health Care Provision – American style! Cut out this crap: Send them on to Canada, or else over to France, where I am (sincerely) sure they will gladly be attended to properly.

But wait – who’s gonna pay for the extra fuel and aircraft wear-and-tear involved in diverting the medevac flights that way? Well, I’m sure there are some French planes there at Port-au-Prince as well, or could be if the American authorities in charge of the airport will allow them to land.

UPDATE: A subsequent NYT article of Sunday, 31 January 2010 now states that the primary reason American medevac flights from Haiti were suspended is because US facilities for treating these patients – mainly in Florida – were simply being overwhelmed. Nevertheless, it does mention Florida governor Charlie Crist mentioning specific financial considerations in a letter he wrote about the situation to Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius.

                          

But now one of those island nations, the Federated States of Micronesia (that’s who you turn to for your “.fm” Internet domain), has found a novel way to do something about it. I first caught word of this from the Some Assembly Required blog, which provided a link to an article in the New York Times sourced to Reuters (so it must be true, eh?). There you can read all about it: The Micronesia government is trying to intervene to influence the re-commissioning of a coal-fired power plant – one located in Prunéřov, Czech Republic, or around 13,000 km away! It has expressed this intention in two official government-to-government letters, one sent last month (while the Copenhagen conference was going on, apparently), and the second (laying out the technical details of what it objects to in the plant) just last week.

I’ve been able to find Czech-press coverage of this rather extraordinary episode only in that country’s main business newspaper, Hospodářské noviny. But that coverage is pretty thorough. There is a main article, telling the story: Micronesia: Prunéřov is [just] one of a thousand power plants, but it still is damaging us. In addition HN has an exclusive interview in a second piece (conducted by an unnamed reporter) with Andrew Yatilman, Minister of the Environment for Micronesia (We are fighting for our lives, Prunéřov is just our first act, says Micronesian minister).

Actually, in contrast to the impression of cool rage that that headline might give you, you’re really struck much more in the interview by how ad hoc this effort is on the part of the Micronesian government – how they are feeling their way as they go along in this legal initiative without precedent. For instance, Greenpeace (as you might expect) has had a big influence in this whole thing: it was protests carried out in front of the Prunéřov plant in question by Czech Greenpeace activists last month that inspired the idea in the first place, and Greenpeace has cooperated closely with the Micronesian government in providing both legal and technical advice. Will you be trying this with other plants, other governments? asks the reporter. For sure, Yatilman replies, although only after this episode is over and we have a chance to learn from the experience. (Note well that Micronesia is not going so far as to demand that the Czech government shut down the plant, it is only asking to be included in the process for granting it approval to re-open, so it can insist on a range of anti-CO2 emission safeguards.) Are any other island nations ready to join you in these efforts? I don’t know yet, Yatilman replies.

The interview concludes with a bit of unwitting comedy, as the HN reporter inquires whether Minister Yatilman is aware of the attitudes towards global warming of the Czech President, Václav Klaus. He is not; HN informs him how Klaus denies that global warming even exists, that he’s one of the world’s most-prominent climate change deniers. “Good that you say that,” replies Yatilman,

because we got a letter from the Czech Republic that purported to be from the president. But we didn’t really believe that. It wasn’t written on any letterhead stationery and it tried to find out why we were doing what we are doing. As if we weren’t a sovereign state. Underneath was some signature, but whether it was from your president, I don’t know. In any case we didn’t take it seriously.

                          

In newly purchased polo shirts and chinos [har har!], the four husky men, members of a restive ethnic minority from western China, might blend in except for their scruffy beards. Smelling hibiscus flowers, luxuriating in the freedom to drift through scenic streets and harbors, they expressed wonder at their good fortune in landing here after a captivity that included more than a year in solitary confinement.

“I went swimming in the ocean for the first time ever yesterday, and it was the happiest day of my life,” said Salahidin Abdulahat, 32.

C’mon, I mean it practically writes itself! Call the film “The Four Uighurs”; Johnny Depp, in scruffy beard, stars as Abdulahat, who winds up working every day in a wetsuit training dolphins to undertake military missions for the Royal Navy from the nearby naval base. His three buddies eventually pool their earnings from work in private gardens and at popsicle-stands to open up their own seaside camping-ground, which they name Camp Delta. Trouble arrives in the form of a restaurant (originally called “Git Ma,” Chinese for “enemy combatant”) started up in the neighborhood by a pair of Cantonese immigrant families. In the end, though, through various hijinks and comic situations everyone learns to live together again in sun-struck island harmony – in fact, Depp even mentors one dolphin with a surprising aptitude for performing point-to-point coastal Chinese take-out deliveries. Take it from there . . .

Maybe you can’t handle writing about an island situation for some reason? Fine, then consider instead the story of another set of Uighurs from Guantánamo, reported on today in the Dutch newspaper Trouw, whom the Obama administration wants to release into yet another sort of strange, paradise-like environment, namely the alpine hills and valleys of Switzerland. This real-life story, alas, comes with no guaranteed happy ending. As Trouw reports, the Swiss are willing enough to accept the former inmates (two of them this time; completely innocent, of course) to try to get back in the good graces of the Obama administration after some prior trouble involving American demands that the Swiss give up their bank-account secrecy. But the Chinese authorities are objecting here, and have warned the Swiss government against taking them. They say that the Uighurs are legitimate terror-suspects after all, and the only place they should go henceforth is back to China for trial.

This scenario could well end up a tragedy, for you can well imagine the “trial” and generally-unpleasant reception the Chinese have prepared for these men. Unfortunately, the recent record of the Swiss of letting themselves be pushed around is not good: there is still an embarrassing dispute ongoing with Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, involving a public apology to Libya by the Swiss president and two Swiss businessmen still held in Tripoli and about to face trial there on trumped-up charges.

                          

Right then, Murdoch has announced he will be putting his properties’ content behind a pay-wall soon, and the New York Times is reportedly considering the same thing. You can cut to the chase and read Chervel’s summing-up of his reaction in a paragraph at the mid-point of his piece: “A few years ago the withdrawal of newspapers from the free Net would still have been painful, today one would miss a few sources, but the Internet has also developed sources and formats that would quickly compensate for that loss.”

He cites the New York Times and the Guardian as the best newspapers currently around. Why? Because they have so successfully woven together what’s on paper and what’s on-line. For example, you can read the Times’ review of a particular book in the paper edition, and then go on-line to read the free extract from that work itself (and then of course click on over to Amazon to purchase it, if you desire). Chervel is particularly enamored of the Times’ “Lede” news blog, which did in fact distinguish itself covering the Iranian civil demonstrations back in the second half of June.

If your success has so much to do with your integration with the Internet, then naturally cutting that integration off with a pay-wall is not the smartest move. Especially since all newspapers – including those two top-in-class he mentions – will have an increasingly-hard time simply retaining their relevance in a world where, if you read something on paper, chances are you already read about it on-line two days ago. Chervel:

Those who want to know Twitter’s strategy for going against Google will today read TechCrunch, Mashable, or Ars Technica. Those who want to know who bungled in what show will click on the video at Gawker. Those who want to know what the new hit of their favorite band sounds like subscribe to the corresponding service on last.fm or wait for the link from their Facebook or Studi-VZ buddies. [Studi-VZ is essentially Germany's Facebook for students.] And à propos public opinion: Was there not recently a petition launched on the Internet at sites like Netzpolitik.org, that also caught our newspapers on the wrong foot?

Related to the muddle in which newspaper executives seem to find themselves when it comes to what really makes their papers stand out these days is their apparent delusion that content has to be made to pay because, after all, newspapers are all about content. Not true, according to Chervel; newspapers have rather always been carriers of advertisements, particularly classified advertisements, and any “content” has only ever been there to entice eyeballs for those ads to pick up the newspaper in the first place. Back in the golden age of newspapers (up until ten or fifteen years ago), they ruled their respective urban areas in mono- or duopolies and could easily overcharge for advertising – there was no other place for the advertiser to go, at least for print! But now technology has taken those cozy arrangements away, and it seems the publishers have simply reacted to this too late.

Murdoch Brought Up the Point – and Now Withdraws It

In the end, Chervel’s piece is entitled Rupert Murdoch – The capitulation. That’s a strong word to apply to such a tough customer as Murdoch. Nonetheless, it probably can be taken to be accurate, if only from his own words – namely from a speech of his from 2005, in which he asked “What can we do – we, a bunch of digital immigrants – to be relevant for the digital generation?” This was back when Murdoch was still trying to figure out how to use what he called “a great new partner – the Internet” to better reach readers.

Now it seems he’s not trying to do that anymore; in fact he has given up. He is desperately trying to scramble back to the old status quo, because he could never find an answer to that question he himself posed four years ago.

(A footnote here, if anyone is interested – as I was – in the comments Chervel provided in this piece that were specific to German newspapers. He maintains that German newspapers have always been very stingy in the amount of content they put on-line. Only the Süddeutsche Zeitung, out of Munich, once let loose enough to create a top-quality site with international ambitions – I must have missed this back whenever it occurred – but then they changed their mind and drew everything back behind a pay-wall. As a result of all this, the German newspapers are not staring extinction so much in the face as other papers are, namely because their readers – and I’m picking up what I take to be his implied argument – never had the chance to get used to much free content, and therefore to cultivate an “I won’t pay!” attitude, in the first place.

This is all extremely interesting to me, since I generally find German newspapers (certainly including the Süddeutsche Zeitung) to be quite sufficiently open in the content they provide to find enough material for this weblog. Indeed, as I mention at the very top, I have a slight feeling I have been overdoing German material lately. But since I generally do not have access to the paper editions – not really interested, actually – it is at the same time impossible for me to form an accurate comparison and evaluation of what those newspapers are willing to put on-line and what they keep in their paper editions only.)

                          

Now according to a further NRC article, it looks like NATO has actually taken notice of Clinton’s remarks and realized that it needs to come up with something to fix this situation. But that NRC report still does not paint what you could call a very reassuring picture. In fact, you could break down its news a follows:

• The Good: It’s no less than the NATO Secretary-General, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, who is reported by the NRC to be determined not only to give NATO’s anti-piracy involvement off the Somali coast a “more long-term character,” but also to make it “more robust,” meaning at the very least the scrapping of this “throw them back” practice. Through his NATO spokesman, De Hoop Scheffer admitted that, up to now, it had been assumed that participating NATO member-states could get by simply with their own national law and the international law of the high seas in their dealings with such pirates. But now that is clearly by the wayside, and efforts are starting to draw up common NATO rules of engagement.
  
• The Bad: But there is another problem coming up which might even slightly delay that writing of the new rules of engagement: most of the NATO ships now on anti-piracy watch off of Somalia are shortly due to leave for other missions, mostly official visits to various ports in Asia! So NATO representatives are now meeting to address that problem first and find some replacement ships (or cancel those port-calls) to ensure a continue naval presence there even as pirate attacks show no sign of abating even after the recent successful, and deadly, US hostage-saving action.
  
• The Indifferent: Even as those NATO officials meet in Brussels, another conference is now going on there, under the sponsorship of the United Nations. Yes, its purpose is to gather together monetary contributions, mainly towards the cause of getting Somalia back on its feet towards becoming a functioning government again which can finally take action against its own pirate-citizens. The sum of $31 million is supposed to go towards building up the Somali police, and a further $134 as a contribution to the work of the peace-keeping mission, sponsored by the African Union, that is currently in that country.

Long-time €S readers will recall that we’ve covered this whole pirates issue here a number of times before. Viewed from that background, to me the truly mysterious aspect of how NATO currently seems to be fumbling the ball in its approach to the Somali pirates is how inconsistent policy is even among the different NATO member states. Yes, we have fresh examples of the Dutch and the Canadians just throwing back the pirates they caught, but we have also noted here before how the Germans at least are willing to deliver the pirates they catch to the authorities at “a Kenyan port,” which probably should be interpreted as Mombasa. And the New York Times has a useful article up about how – somewhat surprisingly – those Kenyan authorities in Mombasa might very well be both willing and able to prosecute – well, as “able” as the government in a relatively poor African country can be. And there is also European Union money apparently already allocated for the Kenyans to bring their maritime judicial facilities a bit closer to the modern age. In any event, Mombasa is clearly a better option than “throwing them back”; why can’t the Dutch and Canadians avail themselves of it?

                          

The second-order discussion here, of course, is over what can be done to eradicate these dangerous maritime nuisances, who since the latter part of last year have become particularly audacious. If you have any ideas and are looking to get into a discussion, then you can of course e-mail me at this weblog, and/or you can resort to fora from the New York Times or the BBC. In the meantime, though, the Danish legislature (the Folketing) has an official solution that it would like brought up before the United Nations, as reported in Berlingske Tidende (Danish proposal should go to UN).

It should be no surprise that the Danes already have a solution to propose, for at least two reasons: 1) The Danes come out of an activist, Protestant, we-can-change-the-world-if-we-try culture that finds it impossible to encounter a problem like this and just shrug its shoulders and move on, and 2) They are heavily involved in international shipping. Indeed, that container ship at the center of the current stand-off, the Maersk Alabama, is owned by a Danish conglomerate, the A.P. Møller-Mærsk Group. The Folketing’s plan was drawn up by the Danish Institute for Military Studies, and it’s a fairly simple one, that starts with the establishment of a regional coast guard for the Somali coast, with start-up costs paid for by the UN, that can serve to warn passing shipping about the specific presence of pirates. But the second essential element is the establishment of some sort of court, with a firm basis in international law to be able to try pirates for their crimes. For one glaring problem is that, too often, Western naval personnel who have actually captured pirates have basically had to throw them right back, like fish that local gaming regulations won’t allow you to keep. We’ve covered this particular problem before here, and this does raise the question about – even if some sort of international court is established to try the pirates – who will be responsible for ensuring that whatever punishment that court prescribes is actually carried out? That point still seems to be a hole in the Danish proposal.

Anyway, though, a parliamentary majority is in place in the Folketing to send it on its way to the UN, although some doubts were expressed by the defense spokesman for the Danish People’s Party, who worried that sending such a proposal to the UN was the quickest way to make sure it got stuck in bureaucracy and went nowhere.

                          

OK, so Bilefsky has his NYT account. (And what luck that he ran across one “Martin Kotas” – last name probably really spelled “Kotaš” – who provided so many pungent opinions about the Americans and enabled him to use the phrase “literally cried into his beer”! But I would counsel Bilefsky to avoid the cheap-but-tempting one-person anecdote in favor of consulting, say, the many polls available that can clearly show how attitudes in this country of 10 million people are against the installation of American radar on its soil, rather than regarding it – as Kotaš seems to – as some “essential bulwark against Russia.”) But the leading Czech business newspaper Hospodářské noviny already had a piece yesterday (Obama cuts consultations with Czechs to a minimum) about Obama’s Prague dilemma, which of course provides further details – like that the EU initially was fighting hard to stage this US-EU summit back in Brussels rather than in Prague. EU leaders don’t like President Klaus much and had no desire to reward him with this summit, but in the end it seems Prague’s sheer “picturesqueness” factor won out. (E.g. fantastic scenery – like Prague Castle, pictured above – in front of which to stage events like a major public speech. And remember that, until the events of this past week, there was no reason to regard Mirek Topolánek as the sort of “toxic” Czech leader that Obama would have to maneuver to avoid, as he always would have to do with regard to President Klaus.) And while there will be a busy schedule of bilateral meetings on Sunday for the American president, the one with Czech representatives will involve President Klaus, Premier Topolánek, and Foreign Minister Karel Schwarzenberg all at the same time yet last only a few minutes. Much more time has been put into the schedule for talks with EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso and the leaders of Poland and Spain – as well as, at the end of Obama’s visit, with former Czech president Václav Havel, who nowadays fills no explicit official or political role and, indeed, has not been in the best of health.

“Undisclosed-Location Restaurant”? No Way

By the way, about that “secret location” for Barack and Obama’s romantic Prague dinner tonight? Remember that this is the Czech Republic and that Central Europe especially has always been a difficult region in which to keep secrets, from way back at the beginning of the Cold War and even before. The Czech daily Lidové noviny has all you might want to know about that romantic evening (Obamas’ dinner? No secret). The restaurant that won the prize of hosting the First Couple turns out to be Terasa U Zlaté Studně (“Terrace at the Golden Well”), rated by the English-language Prague city guide Prague.tv as an “Upscale restaurant, with excellent views” (indeed, see for yourself at their homepage), and located at the bottom of the massive Castle Hill where on Sunday morning Obama will deliver his speech to the gathered masses at the top. (Yes, a “Sermon on the Mount,” you could say.) As restaurant manager Michal Motyčka was glad to reveal to the inquiring LN reporter (and, no doubt, whomever else), “Yes, it’s confirmed. We have Obama and Michelle registered for dinner Saturday evening.” Interestingly, Motyčka went further: “The restaurant is not closed to the public. Obama will be there normally, with other people who come to eat with us that evening.” But don’t go rushing to make your own reservations: they’re already all booked-up. (This probably in itself provides a bit of further commentary on the “secrecy regime” in Prague.) Oh, and on the menu? It will be modern Czech cuisine, so such things as tenderloin and duck with sauerkraut.

* A better translation of Topolánek’s criticism of Obama is probably “highway to hell” – a remark apparently influenced by the Czech Prime Minister’s attendance at the AC/DC concert in Prague shortly before! I ran across this interesting tidbit while scrounging recently through the on-line Czech press, encountering it in someone’s editorial piece. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to go back and track it down to get the reference or the link, so for this I’ll just have to draw on whatever reserves of credibility I have on account with the honored readers of this site.