Wearable simultaneous translation devices may not yet have arrived, but a new wearable computer for corporate ‘field operations’ brings translators that convert voice to text on the fly a step closer to reality.
Japanese electronics giant NEC’s long-awaited Tele Scouter gadget was finally launched in October. Resembling a pair of spectacles, it has frames but lacks lenses and projects text directly onto the user’s retina. Back in 2010, tech blogs reported that there would be an English-to-Japanese version available for use in sensitive situations where ‘confidential translations’ without an interpreter were needed.
When Tele Scouter eventually appeared, NEC told the Gazette, ‘The translation application is not available yet and a release date remains to be decided,’ but it seems to be on the way. See the September 2010 Gazette for Babelfisk, voice-to-text spectacles for the deaf still at the concept design stage.
(This first appeared in the EL Gazette, February 2012, since then Google unveiled a prototype of its simultaneous translation spectacles.)
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
US unis favour ban on agents
MATT SALUSBURY
writes
This first appeared in the EL Gazette of February 2012
TWO THIRDS of admissions officers in US universities and tertiary education colleges favour a ban on the use of commercial agents who recruit international students, according to a recent survey, and over 46 per cent believe that ‘agents often help their clients fabricate information on applications’.
The ‘Survey of College and University Admissions Directors’, published in Inside Higher Ed in early December, also revealed that over a fifth of admissions officers reported a ‘problem with fabricated admissions applications for international students’, while over a quarter of respondents said they ‘strongly agree’ that international students turn up with ‘inadequate requirements for entry’.
The survey’s section on international student recruitment noted, ‘At issue is the growing use of commission-paid agents both by students seeking admission and by institutions recruiting international students.’ The survey concluded that ‘many institutions admit some applicants who apply with lower grades and test scores than those typically admitted’. But this was not restricted to admission of international students – institutions taking in under qualified athletes was perceived as a more common practice.
The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), which represents university and further education college admissions officers, proposed a bar on such institutions using agents back in the spring of 2011, but so far this has not been implemented. At the time NACAC cited ‘complications involving misrepresentation, conflict of interest and fraud’ and an ‘incentive for recruiters to ignore the student interest’ as consequences of using agents.
A group of over 135 educational agents in the US, the American International Recruitment Council (AIRC), whose stated aim is to raise the professional standards of agents who recruit for US higher education, released new proposed guidelines shortly before the survey was published. AIRC’s proposals for ‘revisions to compliance standards’ included forbidding agents from taking a cut of scholarships or financial aid awarded to their clients’, according to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
John Segota, associate executive director for professional relations at Tesol Inc, whose members include English language units at US universities, told the Gazette, ‘Tesol International Association does not have a specific position [on] the use of educational agents.’
writes
This first appeared in the EL Gazette of February 2012
TWO THIRDS of admissions officers in US universities and tertiary education colleges favour a ban on the use of commercial agents who recruit international students, according to a recent survey, and over 46 per cent believe that ‘agents often help their clients fabricate information on applications’.
The ‘Survey of College and University Admissions Directors’, published in Inside Higher Ed in early December, also revealed that over a fifth of admissions officers reported a ‘problem with fabricated admissions applications for international students’, while over a quarter of respondents said they ‘strongly agree’ that international students turn up with ‘inadequate requirements for entry’.
The survey’s section on international student recruitment noted, ‘At issue is the growing use of commission-paid agents both by students seeking admission and by institutions recruiting international students.’ The survey concluded that ‘many institutions admit some applicants who apply with lower grades and test scores than those typically admitted’. But this was not restricted to admission of international students – institutions taking in under qualified athletes was perceived as a more common practice.
The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), which represents university and further education college admissions officers, proposed a bar on such institutions using agents back in the spring of 2011, but so far this has not been implemented. At the time NACAC cited ‘complications involving misrepresentation, conflict of interest and fraud’ and an ‘incentive for recruiters to ignore the student interest’ as consequences of using agents.
A group of over 135 educational agents in the US, the American International Recruitment Council (AIRC), whose stated aim is to raise the professional standards of agents who recruit for US higher education, released new proposed guidelines shortly before the survey was published. AIRC’s proposals for ‘revisions to compliance standards’ included forbidding agents from taking a cut of scholarships or financial aid awarded to their clients’, according to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
John Segota, associate executive director for professional relations at Tesol Inc, whose members include English language units at US universities, told the Gazette, ‘Tesol International Association does not have a specific position [on] the use of educational agents.’
Every Time I Think of You - Islington in the 80s
A couple of my photos of Islington in the 1980s appear on screen briefly in the film Every Time I Think of You, which had its one and only showing at the Screen on the Green in Upper Street (Islington, of course!) recently.
The film will be free to view online soon via the link above. It's based on interviews by people living and working in Islington (Chapel Market in particular) in that decade, some spoken by the interviewees themselves, some revoiced by actors. Actors and interviewees alike were persuaded to improvise something about a mystery woman who was known and loved by all in that era, and who went missing on New Year's Eve 1989 - Toni Sling. We only get to see a blurred photo of her. I don't need to tell you it's an anagram of Islington.
As usual, my name was spelt wrong in the film credits, I was down as "Matt Salisbury" in the "photos supplied by" section. My nephew Luke Reilly, like me also Islington born and bred, is credited for "additional dialogue" and "interviews conducted by". Regretably, his interviews of me, centering on working as a bike messenger among the typesetters of 1980s Clerkenwell, didn't make it into the script.
I recommend the film, and there's also an online photo exhibition of Islington in the 80s from which the photos in the film were taken. Click through this, and you can see all my photos from that bygone age, with my credit on them.
The two photos that made it into the film are a legal observer from the 1984 Stop the City demo in Finsbury Square - funny how history repeats itself! - and if you look closely you can see the Islington Council creche bus that someone's borrowed for the occasion. Finsbury Square was just outside the City, and sympathisers among Council workers ran the demo's first aid point and so on from there. While bank-bashing by the likes of Stop the City was the pastime of a tiny minority of mostly marginal punk anarchists in those days, it has become mainstream now.
The other photo is Islington Town Hall, when it was a "Red" council driven by gesture politics of this sort. Nobody bats an eyelid at much higher unemployment figures but it was a national scandal at the time. And beggars in the streets of London started to make their first appearance in my lifetime around then, to the shock of many. The Town Hall's not flying the Red Flag in the photo although it regularly did in those days. They gave up when firemen from the fire station a few doors down allegedly abseiled up the building and took it down, on several occasions. There was also an old bust of Lenin on display at the top of the stairs of the Town Hall at the time, which once had green paint tipped over it. Why green? No one knows. The opposite of red, perhaps>
An image pasted into my early 1980s scrapbook - a strip from the not very funny "Lazarus Lamb" cartoon, from the contemporary Islington Gutter Press, also flits briefly across the screen in the film.
I'm afraid I don't agree with the view expressed in the film that the 1980s was an age of innocence before the internet and mobile phones. The Eighties sucked. They were the low point of human history, when thousand of years of progress stopped overnight, to be replaced with Thatcherite/Reaganite Free Market Fever, which is bizarrely still with us today, only more so.
Update (November 2025): The film is no longer linked from the Blueprint Theatre website, I've added above the link to it on YouTube.
The film will be free to view online soon via the link above. It's based on interviews by people living and working in Islington (Chapel Market in particular) in that decade, some spoken by the interviewees themselves, some revoiced by actors. Actors and interviewees alike were persuaded to improvise something about a mystery woman who was known and loved by all in that era, and who went missing on New Year's Eve 1989 - Toni Sling. We only get to see a blurred photo of her. I don't need to tell you it's an anagram of Islington.
As usual, my name was spelt wrong in the film credits, I was down as "Matt Salisbury" in the "photos supplied by" section. My nephew Luke Reilly, like me also Islington born and bred, is credited for "additional dialogue" and "interviews conducted by". Regretably, his interviews of me, centering on working as a bike messenger among the typesetters of 1980s Clerkenwell, didn't make it into the script.
I recommend the film, and there's also an online photo exhibition of Islington in the 80s from which the photos in the film were taken. Click through this, and you can see all my photos from that bygone age, with my credit on them.
The two photos that made it into the film are a legal observer from the 1984 Stop the City demo in Finsbury Square - funny how history repeats itself! - and if you look closely you can see the Islington Council creche bus that someone's borrowed for the occasion. Finsbury Square was just outside the City, and sympathisers among Council workers ran the demo's first aid point and so on from there. While bank-bashing by the likes of Stop the City was the pastime of a tiny minority of mostly marginal punk anarchists in those days, it has become mainstream now.
The other photo is Islington Town Hall, when it was a "Red" council driven by gesture politics of this sort. Nobody bats an eyelid at much higher unemployment figures but it was a national scandal at the time. And beggars in the streets of London started to make their first appearance in my lifetime around then, to the shock of many. The Town Hall's not flying the Red Flag in the photo although it regularly did in those days. They gave up when firemen from the fire station a few doors down allegedly abseiled up the building and took it down, on several occasions. There was also an old bust of Lenin on display at the top of the stairs of the Town Hall at the time, which once had green paint tipped over it. Why green? No one knows. The opposite of red, perhaps>
An image pasted into my early 1980s scrapbook - a strip from the not very funny "Lazarus Lamb" cartoon, from the contemporary Islington Gutter Press, also flits briefly across the screen in the film.
I'm afraid I don't agree with the view expressed in the film that the 1980s was an age of innocence before the internet and mobile phones. The Eighties sucked. They were the low point of human history, when thousand of years of progress stopped overnight, to be replaced with Thatcherite/Reaganite Free Market Fever, which is bizarrely still with us today, only more so.
Update (November 2025): The film is no longer linked from the Blueprint Theatre website, I've added above the link to it on YouTube.
Wednesday, 27 June 2012
Prof David Crystal's talk on "the future of Englishes"
Updated 03/07/12
Professor David Crystal (above, in glasses, with a white beard) - probably the UK's most famous linguist, who gave evidence to a Parliamentary committee on bureaucratic jargon in government - recently gave a (June 2012) talk at the University of Westminster on "the future of Englishes."
Key points of Prof. Crystal's talk were that American English had developed within days of the first Elizabethan mariners arriving in the New World, when they started writing letters home with new words to describe new concepts - "moccasins", "skunk", etc.
While even 20 years ago, non-native speakers would have been ridiculed for their very different intonation, Prof. Crystal notes that with non-natives now outnumbering native speakers four to one, we don't even notice a very different intonation in English anymore.
Correction (03/07/12): Did I really say "we don't even notice"? Yes I did. What I meant to say, of course, based on my possibly imperfect understanding of what Prof. Crystal said, was that we hardly comment on a different intonation in English anymore, even if we do notice it. There is, of course, a difference.
Prof. Crystal also quoted the Earl of Leicester's travelogue of his tour of Europe in 1582, in which he mentioned useful languages - Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, but definitely not English, which has "no use beyond our shores." English didn't even have a literature, with "Father Chaucer" already incomprehensible after just 200 years. This was, of course, a very short time before two developments put English on the map - obscure Midlands poet William Shakespeare began writing sonnets, and the first English adventures in the New World of America started.
I was at Professor Crystal's talk in my capacity as news and features editor of EL Gazette, global newspaper for the English language teaching industry, and put a question to the Professor about the likely effect that the wearable simultaneous translation computers currently in development will have on English as a lingua franca.
Prof Crystal told me he reads every issue of the EL Gazette and that he'd noticed my byline was "all over every issue."
The EL Gazette now has a Twitter feed twitter.com/elgazette and there's now an online tutorial on how to register with EL Gazette digital and search its back issues.
Monday, 25 June 2012
A taxing question – can EFL teachers freelance legally?
Update - 11/07/12 - The HMRC ruling that Teflers cannot in most circumstances be self-employment seems to have been repealed in April 2012. See the HMRC's ruling on this here. http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/manuals/esmmanual/esm4503.htm - Thanks to Sue-Lyon Jones for the update (@esolcourses on Twitter) via the EL Gazette's twitter feed.
I hope to follow up on this ruling, unscramble what it means in English, and work out its implications for EFL teachers, in a future EL Gazette article.
EL Gazette has recently heard of two more cases of EFL teachers being engaged by language schools on a self-employed basis - completely illegal in the UK as we at EL Gazette understand it. This feature - which first appeared in the EL Gazette of April 2011 - explains why.
A taxing question – can EFL teachers freelance legally?
Matt Salusbury investigates how the law governing self-employment varies considerably across Europe
An EL Gazette correspondent forwarded us details of teaching work offered by a central London language school, asking, ‘Is this sort of thing legal – treating teachers as “self-employed” and paying them in cash?’
Engaging EFL teachers as self-employed and paying them fees without deducting tax or National Insurance (NI) contributions towards unemployment benefits is unusual enough in the UK to raise eyebrows. Can language schools hire teachers as freelances or does the law force them to take on teachers as salaried staff and make statutory deductions up front? And what about EFL teachers in other EU countries?
Under the UK tax system both employer and employee pay NI contributions. Freelances are supposed to pay their own tax and (lower rate) NI. While it may be convenient for schools to have freelances on their books – no holiday or sick pay or unfair dismissal cases to worry about – if Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs find out about this arrangement and the school can’t prove to HMRC that all its freelance teachers have paid tax, the school will be liable.
The key document determining whether UK-based ‘teachers, lecturers and tutors’ have to be employees or can freelance is HMRC’s ESM 4503. This clearly states that anyone teaching ‘in the presence of their students’ in ‘an educational establishment’ or ‘anywhere indoors and outdoors where instruction is given’ must be an employee and can’t freelance. ESM 4503 allows lecturers to be self-employed only if they teach less than ‘three days in three consecutive months’ or give lectures only to the general public.
EFL teachers who arrange private lessons and charge students directly can freelance. ‘Trainers’ aren’t included in ESM 4503 and there may be cases where freelance business English trainers are paid directly by the company whose students they teach, with the school taking a finder’s fee, or arrangements where teaching co-ops hire classrooms from another school and are paid by their students. Otherwise, forget EFL freelancing.
The Inland Revenue (precursor to HMRC) raided Oxford Street’s language schools, once in the late 1980s and again in 1997. Every school we’ve heard of has lost such cases against HMRC.
And in other countries? In Ireland, where employee deduc tions are for Pay Related Social Insurance, it’s generally hard to engage freelances. Courts have ruled that contracts stating ‘you are responsible for your own tax affairs’ have ‘little validity’.
In Spain salaries are quoted net of tax except for a small proportion of NI. Employers are responsible for all other taxes. Tax is complicated enough for many Teflers in Spain to sign up to companies such as Sapic, which charge annual fees for handling all the invoicing, tax and social security affairs of teachers on its books. It’s worth being an autonomo if you earn €20,000 (£16,900) or more a year.
While being a freelance is comparatively more advantageous in Spain, Aiden O’Toole, director of Spainwise.net, told the Gazette, ‘It’s difficult for schools to get away with having freelancers, except where a lot of the teaching involves business English and the classes are given in the workplace. Madrid and Barcelona are two places where teachers’ pay is almost always quoted as an hourly rate (whereas it’s usually given as a monthly salary in most of the rest of Spain), and these hourly rates are a sure indicator that freelancers are being used widely.’
It’s hard to freelance in France, where the default setting is to be a pigiste, paid a kind of pro-rata salary for work for clients with a hefty chunk deducted towards social security.
The Netherlands seems relatively easier to freelance in. Much of its private-sector EFL is in-company business English training with hours, supervision and equipment determined by the client more than the language institute.
Matt Salusbury is an employee with EL Gazette New Media Ltd and a self-employed freelance for numerous other publications
Monday, 18 June 2012
Leveson debrief, Olympic policing, still earning from travel writing...
The June 2012 online edition of the Freelance is now up.
My articles include:
* Who watches the Wardens? "Heritage Wardens" in Trafalgar Square obstructing photographers - again! Read more...
* Key Leveson Inquiry witness and NUJ Gen Sec Michelle Stanistreet gives testimony before London Freelance Branch - more on Leveson. Read here...
* Some mileage left in travel writing - still (just) possible to make a living out of it. Read more...
* Metropolitan Police Olympic briefing - what to expect from Met policing of the Olympics. With acting Deputy Commissioner Chris Allison and Commander Bob Broadhurst. Read more...
* A right to report? NUJ London Freelance Branch monitoring of incidents in which journalists encounter the police. An appeal...
Pythonesque influence on Network Rail signage
Good to see that Network Rail - not normally known for their sense of humour - have allowed themselves to be inspired by Monty Python in their latest temporary signage at their new King's Cross development.
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