NHS Translating Services

http://www.nhsdirect.nhs.uk/

NHS Direct – Home

… as long as you speak English that is.

I’ve just realised that the NHS Direct website isn’t a multilingual site. I began to wonder if this was because it would be too expensive or whether catering to the mulitiple languages spoken in the UK would somehow weaken the binding power of English. Well here’s a 2020health.org report on the amount spent on translation and interpreting by the NHS and, shock horror, it was found that a lot of money is being spent, it’s being inefficiently spent, and that savings could be made …

Our research shows that the NHS spends an incredible £60,000 every single day on translation services. That is over £20,000,000 a year.

much too much, so:

Urgent action must be taken by Trusts to stem the flow of translation costs and our report sets out a number of recommendations that would do exactly that without altering the level of care given.

Rather than making websites multilingual and enabling interpreters to work at a distance, the main innovative way that this think tank can come up with to save money is to replace medical jargon with simple English. In that way, the argument goes, people who don’t speak English will understand what’s going on.

The NHS has been told by its own patient feedback that documents in simple English – instead of medical jargon – would be acceptable to most people currently using the translation services. It wouldn’t take much effort to drastically cut the £23million of taxpayers’ money that is spent each year on bureaucratic and often duplicated translation fees, and free the money up for treating patients.

I think there’s a danger here. I’m all for jargon-free, simple and direct language use. But there is context and context. There are contexts in which precise, exact, expression – both bio-medical and human – is absolutely essential. ‘Plain English’ is no substitute. It might even be dangerous leading to imprecise understanding and/or translation back to a mother tongue. Sometimes only a language in which a person is absolutely secure will suffice to aid understanding, communicate empathy and enable decision-making.

When the opportunities for providing multilingual services have never been greater it is more than churlish to deny millions of people the option and claim that ‘levels of care’ can remain unchanged.

Nick Hanauer on TED

TED videos celebrate and have been celebrated for ‘ideas worth spreading’. But that’s only if Chris Anderson, the man behind TED finds the idea politically palatable. ‘Too partisan’ was the reason he gave for not uploading a six minute talk given by Nick Hanauer.

Here’s the idea that Hanauer wanted to spread:

In a capitalist economy, the true job creators are consumers, the middle class. And taxing the rich to make investments that grow the middle class, is the single smartest thing we can do for the middle class, the poor and the rich.

Clearly, Hollande hasn’t made much of a wave in the US yet …

I’ve watched a lot of videos over the last couple of years from TED. The best were the most partisan – they expressed a passion, ferver and strong belief in an idea. Seems like Hanauer’s idea was just the wrong idea. Makes you think how many other ‘wrong’ ideas just didn’t get uploaded.

Anyway, ‘once digital, t’will out’ and here’s Hanauer’s talk in its entirety.

Amnesty International: Social Media Action Centre

It seems like phase 1 of this project is just coming to an end. I’m surprised there wasn’t more buzz about it … I’m hoping that by the end of the month there’ll be some information about how widespread the participation has been.

It would be easy to superficially trash such a concept as the social media action centre. Morozov’s attack on such activism as being just another form of armchair posturing (he calls it ‘slacktivism’) that has little social impact would be the classical attack. But I think it’s more interesting to consider the extent to which the most minimal action, such as a tweet, may part of a wider involvement that also involves direct action on the street. Digital activism in this account is not part of a binary (action/inaction) but is a continuum of activities: at one extreme the automated tweet and at the other the real time street protest documenting repression and mobilising action.

The Social Media Action Centre gives you the opportunity to take a simple action for justice every two weeks from May 2011 to May 2012. These actions link with Amnesty supporters from across the globe, focusing on six campaign areas where we believe we can make progress in Amnesty’s 50th anniversary year. The Events harness the power of social media so that people can speak out together against human rights abuses.

 

via AI50.ca – Social Media Action Centre.

El Partido de Internet

Here’s is something really interesting that has arisen out of Los Indignados who have populated Spanish cities since the beginning of last year. The Partido de Internet (PDI) is a radical rethink of how direct democracy could work harnessing the power of internet technology.

PDI is a policy-agnostic political party that does not have, nor will ever have, a political ideology. It has a single and radical proposal: PDI elected representatives will vote in congress according to what the people have previously voted through the internet using Agora.

This platform, Agora, aspires to create a virtual parliament where every decision is made directly. Of course there are delegates because an individual citizen would never have time to vote directly on every issue. But the delegates are simply there to exercise the will of the voter – if the delegate should  try not to express the will of the voter, then the vote goes to another delegate who will. It’s referred to as liquid democracy because this system of delegates always ensures that the will of the voter stays paramount.

The website runs through how this might work – it’s potential and the pitfalls that currently stand in the way of its adoption. A lot of people will immediately be skeptical (security, privacy etc. …). But surely it would be better than the rabid politiking that is currently ruining Greece.

The PDI is one of 12 members of the Mission for Electronic Direct Democracy(E2D). Interestingly, no member from the UK. Perhaps that’s because we all think that democracy is running so smoothly we only need to act directly once every five years …


 

TED-Ed: Flippin’ Classrooms

Some of the ideas of using technology in order to subvert the mass industrial education (propaganda) ‘lock-step’ model are finally filtering through to the mainstream press. So, there’s been extensive reporting of TED-Ed‘s initiative to enable teachers to create their own lessons using YouTube videos.

The ‘Flip this Video’ idea takes an earlier suggestion by ?, that teachers should invert the traditional model where they deliver the class and then send students home to do homework based on it. Instead (the suggestion goes) teachers could upload a video of the class they would have delivered which students watch at home and then use class time to do the work based on those materials. The result is less passive learning and more active doing with the teacher supporting, guiding, etc. Because it often involved using a Flip camera to make that initial video, the moniker has stayed.

Here’s what it looks like:

 

In many ways it’s a great initiative. We’ve all been using YouTube videos for a while now, collecting them together in various playlists and channels and embedding them in materials that exploit their contents in pedagogically rich ways. So, TEDEd is providing another way to use content and save it in a way that makes it easily accessible. The downside is the rather pedagogically poor ways in which this is currently offered: watch-quiz-watch or read something else. It’s a bit passive and reinforces the idea that students often have, that you can learn by absorbing what you see. You can’t. You learn by doing something.