Conversation topic for 25/11 Should countries be held liable for nuclear testing?

French Polynesia: Billion dollar nuclear claim

By News from Elsewhere......media reports from around the world, found by BBC Monitoring

An overseas territory governed by France is to ask Paris for nearly $1bn in compensation for damage caused by nuclear weapons tests, it's been reported.

The assembly of French Polynesia, based in Papete, has prepared a demand for $930m (£594m) over the 193 tests carried out by France in the South Pacific between 1966 and 1996, Radio New Zealand International reports. The ruling Tahoeraa Huiraatira party, which opposes independence from France, is also demanding an additional $132m for the continued occupation of a pair of atolls used for nuclear testing but which still not been returned.

French Polynesia is a territory comprising more than 100 islands and atolls with its own government, but is still part of the French Republic. At the end of French nuclear testing in 1996, former Polynesian president Gaston Flosse negotiated a $150m annual payment to support the country's economy.

The billion-dollar claim is not universally popular in Papete. Current president Edouard Fritch said he was unaware of the assembly's demand and was "disappointed" at plans to ask Paris for the money, Radio New Zealand reported.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-30175925?print=true

Discussion topic for 25/11 Are vaccines safe?

The parents refusing to vaccinate their children against polio

By Shaimaa KhalilBBC News, Karachi

There have been more than 200 cases of polio in Pakistan since January - the first time infections have reached this level in nearly 15 years. Despite this, not everyone wants their children to be vaccinated.

Abrar Khan, who is 26, makes his way into a poor neighbourhood of Karachi called Baldia.

On his crutches, he carefully avoids potholes and dirty cesspools in the narrow alleyways lined, on both sides, with small houses.

He contracted polio when he was three. Now he's part of a team trying to change the minds of families who refuse to have their children vaccinated.

Many people here think the polio vaccination campaign is a western conspiracy to sterilise their children - it's an idea the Taliban have been putting about for 10 years now.

In 2012 the militants ordered a complete ban on vaccinations in the tribal areas in western Pakistan as a response to US drone attacks.

Since then there's been no immunisation in that area.

As a result, says the children's charity Unicef, nearly 300,000 children have missed out on vaccination in that area in the last two years.

Most of the residents of Baldia came originally from Pakistan's tribal areas and most are reluctant to immunise their children.

Yet this is considered a high risk area for polio and I can see why. There's no sanitation to speak of.

As I walk through the narrow streets, I pass an open sewer running through a residential area.

Even before you see this canal full of sewage and rotten rubbish, you can smell it.

It's just the sort of environment in which polio thrives yet around us are about a dozen children, who all look under the age of five, playing in these squalid conditions.

Khan and the other health workers are being escorted by armed policemen. Without their protection the polio team can't do their job.

Many health workers and security personnel have been killed during immunisation campaigns across the country - I'm told there was a shooting in this neighbourhood not long ago.

We stop at one of the houses and an elderly woman answers the door. Four curious little children pop out next to her.

"None of the neighbours' kids has had it," she says of the vaccine. "Why are you after my grandchildren? I don't want this, I don't trust it," she adds angrily as she waves us away.

Khan moves on to the next house. A man stands in front of the entrance and starts shouting at him: "My children don't need this. Leave them alone! Why are you after them? And why just polio? There are other diseases why are you focusing on this one?" he yells.

Khan calmly replies: "We're trying to eliminate polio. We're trying to show that we can do this."

But the man shouts back: "Show who? America? I don't care about them."

People start to gather round us as he shouts: "I don't trust this team."

Khan tries again, this time he takes out a small brochure from a folder he has with him. It's a fatwa, a religious decree from a well-known cleric, which condones polio vaccination.

"What's this?" the father says, now more agitated than ever. "I can't read," he says, "why are you giving me this?"

Finally he tells Khan to leave, goes back into the house and slams the door.

As we walk away from the house, Khan explains: "I try to tell them in any way I can, but they aren't willing to listen. I say 'look at me, I'm a victim of polio. Your children could be like me,'" he says, pointing at his legs.

I can hear the frustration in his voice: "This man is doing his children a big injustice. He's taking them down a path of lifelong disability. He's the children's worst enemy."

This refusal to vaccinate is one of many reasons why Pakistan is failing to eradicate polio. But it's not just the influence of the Taliban - experts now point the finger at government mismanagement as well.

Polio

• Poliomyelitis mainly affects children under five
• Invades the nervous system and can cause total paralysis within hours
• One in 200 infections leads to irreversible paralysis
• Polio cases have decreased by more than 99% since 1988
• Endemic in three countries - Afghanistan, Nigeria and Pakistan
• There is no cure but the virus can be prevented by immunisation

Source: World Health Organization

A recent report described Pakistan's polio programme as a disaster. Campaigns take a long time to organise and when they finally get under way, they're inefficient.

The polio workers themselves are overworked and underpaid and they risk their lives trying to do their job.

Some tell me they have to wait for days to get the proper security personnel to escort them.

And so there have been more than 200 cases this year - that's more than 200 families watching their loved ones suffer from something that could easily have been prevented.

At the end of a long day Khan invites me back to his family house. He got married recently and I meet his bride and about a half a dozen other women. his sisters and sisters-in-law.

Altogether there are seven families in the house and between them around 26 children.

"How many children do you want?" I ask him. "Three inshallah, God willing," he says, "and I will vaccinate them," he adds, with a hopeful smile.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-30133279

Conversation topic for 18/11: Language of business

Translation tech helps firms talk business round the world 

English is the language of business, right? Er... not really.

If the oft-heard maxim were universally true, the outsourced translation market wouldn't be worth a chunky $37bn (£23bn) or be growing at about 6% a year.

While content in English still dominates the web, "billions of people don't read English at all or well enough to make buying decisions," concludes a survey by Common Sense Advisory, a business research consultancy.

In reality, businesses must translate and localise products into a host of different languages, and that requires linguists.

And with competition among translation firms fierce, many are turning to technology to steal a march on their rivals.

Found in translation

Take Thebigword, a Leeds-based firm employing about 12,000 linguists in 73 countries covering 500 languages. Its previous clients include Ricoh, Electrolux and DHL.

The firm says it can connect you with an interpreter in just 31 seconds by phone, localise your market messages or translate your documents.

However, it believes the real weapon in its technological arsenal is its new "translation management system" (TMS), which claims to deliver projects four times faster than the industry standard by automating project workflow and using computer-assisted translation tools.

Imagine you are a technology business launching a new phone in multiple countries on the same day.

"Translation for a job like that goes through a huge amount of different processes - it's not just one page sent, translate it and send it back," says chief executive Larry Gould.

"It may have diagrams on it or illustrations, or need to be presented a certain way, localised, edited and double-proofed. And of course you've got to do it all to tight deadlines."

Mr Gould can use up to 200 linguists on a single project like this, spread across 33 countries. But the TMS helps co-ordinate the process, allocating the workload across time zones to speed things up and cut costs.

Language barrier?

Such firms still rely heavily on human linguists but are increasingly complementing them with lower-cost automated "machine translation" tools, known as MT in the business.

Ben Sargent, a senior analyst at Common Sense, says such technology has its drawbacks, but can work well for low-stakes, high-volume work, particularly online.

"We estimate that less than half of 1% of all the digital content that could and should be translated, actually is.

"No-one has the budget to do all that. So in low-value content applications, like user-generated content and consumer-to-consumer interactions, automated translation gets a lot more traction."

For example, when eBay realised that more than 20% of its sales involved cross-border trade - and that its international business was growing faster than its domestic business - it acquired AppTek's machine translation technology to help meet the demand for local language listings.

Currently eBay only translates listings in countries such as Brazil and Russia, but eventually wants to help sellers list their goods in multiple languages, and chat to buyers via instant messaging that translates in real time.

But Ryan Frankel, chief executive of VerbalizeIt, a translation firm that uses only human translators, is not convinced by MT.

He believes that it "is light years away" from delivering anything beyond a "get the gist" solution.

"Businesses rightly value accuracy but also brand, industry and cultural-specific terminology and nuances that require an experienced and trained community of translation professionals."

Even advocates of the technology admit that an accuracy rate of about 70% is considered excellent, but that this can only usually be achieved for technical documents using highly consistent terminology.

Once the slang phrases, idioms and metaphors of normal human conversation are thrown into the mix, accuracy can plummet to 30%.

Beam me up Scotty

"Speech-to-speech" technology, which translates the human voice in near real time into text or words spoken by your computer, offers some exciting possibilities.

Although it is certainly in its early stages - Microsoft's pre-beta Skype Translator tool, unveiled in May, was clunky and slow in demonstration to say the least - speech-to-speech is evolving fast.

According to analyst Gartner the market is likely to mature in the next five to 10 years.

SpeechTrans, a frontrunner in the space, claims its users can have a conversation in more than 40 languages over fixed-line or internet phone, and that the technology can even recognise different accents and dialects.

"In four years we have been able to accomplish more than was ever thought possible in this area of technology," says Mark Coviello, director of sales.

"At this rate we foresee the ability for any human being to communicate with any other human being without error [using speech-to-speech]."

Hewlett-Packard has already integrated SpeechTrans into MyRoom, its web conferencing platform, enabling business professionals "anywhere in the world to collaborate in 30 different languages, in the same conversation, at the same time".

The technology giant won't tell the BBC how many users it has, but says "adoption is increasing", along with the application's accuracy and speed.

'Dubious results'

Still, Mr Sargent says such platforms have a long way to go before they really take off.

"Progress can be slow, and the utility of these systems today is limited.

"Don't expect to see courtroom or hospital interpreters being replaced anytime soon, except for emergency situations, where dubious results may still be better than nothing."

As with MT, some also doubt whether speech-to-speech will ever really grasp the nuances of language the way a human can. Still, Mr Coviello claims taking humans out of the equation has its benefits, too.

"We find that there may not always be a person available for translation when needed the most, or that due to certain ideologies or conditions the person translating may mistranslate what is being said."

While businesses will surely explore automated translation technology for its cost-saving potential, it seems that demand for high-quality human translation will continue to grow as multilingual content proliferates.

"We believe new technology has to be embraced because there is just so much communication required out there," says Thebigword's Mr Gould.

"It's brilliant for our industry - [technology] will enhance our business, not take away from it."

Source: http://www.bbc.com/news/business-29985865