Looks like I can avoid it no longer...

...but Christmas is nearly upon us. I feel I've done pretty well to ignore its commercial existence and hold out until now, but it's now dawned on me, bah humbug, that there's not much time left.

Now at this point I want to make something fairly clear - I love Christmas. Me and the wife celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary this year, just two days before Christmas, we loved the idea of getting all our friends, as well as family, together around then and getting married and then having a Christmas dinner with both our families the day before Christmas, so did just that.

What I don't like is when shops start putting up their decorations in August. It just annoys me. It's got nothing to do with Christmas and everything to do with commercialism. I realise this is no astounding new insight for anyone but it just annoys me.

But the other day V told me she wanted to get out the CDs of carols to listen to. So while she's off Christmas shopping today with her Dad and I'm out at work she's got my iPod with the carols CDs on them, 'cos she loves them so much.

So here we go then, the mad rush finally commences!

So hang me for treason...

...but I'm kinda glad England lost last night and don't now qualify for Euro 2008.  Glad because, amongst other things, it'll mean (or at least should mean) that we're spared all the jingoism, flag-waving, so-called patriotism that we get EVERY FLIPPING TIME the football team qualifies for a tournament.

I'm also glad because hopefully, surely now the FA will have to look at the whole set-up, top to bottom, and actually do something to earn the unfeasibly large amounts of cash they receive.  The whole thing about imposing quotas on foreign players is a smokescreen, just put up so there's another scapegoat for failure to qualify.   Hopefully people will see past it.

You need to question why such immoral amounts of money are being paid for and to English/British players first before you start looking at the foreign imports.  If someone becomes a millionaire aged 20/21, by and large on the basis of the fortune of their nationality, hardly too surprising if they lose motivation.

Heard a few interesting theories.  We've got a plumber working at our house today and one of his suggestions was to pay players a basic wage, say £10k a week (it's outrageous but just go with me for now).  For a striker, you say you only get to keep that money if you score.  Go 3-4 games without a goal and I take 25% of your salary back.  For a 'keeper, it's based on clean sheets.  Concede goals, you lose money.

Of course, as with a quota system, it's pie in the sky and most probably illegal.

The other idea I like is one put forward, I think, by Danny Baker years ago.  It was simply this:  players get paid, in cash (obviously deduct all their taxes etc, not talking that kind of cash payment!) after each match.  But here's the catch: they have to go on the pitch and collect their wages in front of their paymasters - the fans.  Would be interesting to see how many of them had the brass neck to go and pick up £100k per week for being average when 50,000 pairs of eyes are trained on them...

The one where Andy gets on his soapbox...

So I get in to work this morning to be confronted by a couple of articles cut out from a recent copy of 'The Guardian' on my desk. I've managed to find the on-line version of one but not the other. And that's a shame, as the second kind of complements the first.

They're both about languages, one about translating, the other about their teaching. The first one is something which makes me smile but simultaneously reassures me that, as a translator, I'll likely have work for a reasonable amount of time. It's from Wednesday's edition, is written by Jon Henley (click link for original, mine's a summary) and goes like this:

Babel Fish, the online translation site, has nearly caused a diplomatic row after a group of Israeli journalists decided to use it to address some questions to officials at the Dutch foreign ministry, rather than get the work done professionally by translators.

If any of you have ever used Babel Fish you'll know just how spectacularly bad it can be. Indeed online translation machines like this are so bad one was used to form the basis of a game played on Radio 1 where a song lyric would be put, in English, into one of these things, translated through at least one foreign language before being put back into English. The results were almost always completely incomprehensible and bore no relation to the original song.

I also know (and have told some of you the story) of one company who used one of these sites to translate all their promotional material into French and German, then wondered why they'd not heard anything from any of the people they sent the stuff to, in French- and German-speaking countries.

So the upshot of this first article is that I can sleep a little easier knowing I might be in work for a little while to come. But the second article (which I can't find online), by Marcel Berlins, discusses the poor quality of language teaching in schools, the government's 2003 decision to abandon compulsory language teaching in secondary schools, and the fact that all this comes at a time when the world is becoming more and more open to communication and with it learning foreign languages, while the UK is by and large burying its head in the sand and resolutely sticking to its arrogant belief that the rest of the world speaks English so why bother learning another language.

Great for me, professionally, but sad. I now do a little bit of tutoring to an AS level student of French and I was stunned to see the gaps in knowledge of certain things (not her fault, a fault of the teaching she's had), fairly basic, and the errors in the materials she's been given to study French. But I was equally amazed at the fact that at the same time as she has those gaps in knowledge about France and quirky bits of culture specific to France (in this case the 'départements') she is expected to debate all the kinds of issues I remember having to discuss in my GCSE English Oral Exam (euthanasia, abortion, homosexuality etc). Surely to learn a language it's of benefit to know a bit about the country before being expected to discuss its social issues in depth?

OK, rant over...

12/11/07 - UPDATE: I've now found the second article on-line. It's here, the fourth paragraph being the start of the relevant bit.