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Feature Essay: Language Engineering and Public PolicyKevin CareyPage 1 ¦ Page 2 ¦ Page 3 ¦ Page 4 ¦ Printer-friendly version In the present time, then, our relationship with text has become ephemeral and transient. It is true that in many cases we still hold to the idea of the "true" or "definitive" version of some text or other, but this is becoming increasingly rare. Rather, we become accustomed to revisions, interpretations, filters, intermediaries and so on, interposing themselves between reader and author. This has many implications, which I will explore under the subheadings which follow. The Clarity of the Author's IntentionIn October 2002 the Government put on the Order Paper of the House of Commons a debate on the "Reinvention of Urban Post offices". It turned out to be a debate on the closure of some 3,000 of these. However in the Minister's opening statement there was also the promise of matched funding for the Post Offices which did not close so they could develop their customer bases by providing a more modern and attractive environment for customers. The Opposition spokesman deliberately took "Reinvention" to be an Orwellian euphemism for closure. However one could also take it to be a deliberate attempt to focus on the package's positive side. Does it matter? The text of the Minister's statement puts the word "Reinvention" into its proper framework as connected to the funding package. Nor did the Minister shy away from using the word "close" to describe what would have to happen to some Post Offices. Therefore, the Opposition's charge was flawed. Yet, if you were simply trying to use the headline on the Order Paper to get the essence of what was being proposed it would be entirely misleading. This is not a problem for people who exist for the consumption of small print but in the world of sound bites it is crucial. The Government made a decision to write a headline dealing with a secondary aspect of its package and therefore was attacked for misleading "spin". At the other end of the spectrum, what about the authorial intention of parts of the Bible. Even without the theological disputes which rage about how far various texts are a contemporary ethical primer, there are issues around historicity, anthropology, poetics, language translation and emendation. Nor are these problems confined to ancient texts. In Salman Rushdie's novel Midnight's Children the reader is faced with a multitude of problems which are very similar. In the digital world we may have to distinguish very clearly between what we think of as an artistic artefact and a collective artefact. There are two kinds of authorial intention: one individually and the other collectively owned. The first will be textually and structurally sacrosanct. The communal document, on the other hand, must be stripped of artistic pretensions and be crafted specifically so that it can be readily amplified or simplified. This division is a clear illustration of both the problem and the challenge for the preparation of collective documents which become public property. The Requirement for Correspondence and Backwards Compatibility.If a document is amplified or simplified it must correspond, and be traceable, to the initial source file. If a Government White Paper is edited to half the length, to avoid any accusation of manipulation the reader must be able to return to the file from which the simplification came. I have in mind here a multiple choice offer to readers something like this: a source (Government, or any other) offers a document in a variety of lengths, say 100%, 20% and 1% (or, the full text, the briefing paper and the executive summary). To engage in the compression of any text is often to make more difficult and to increase the quantity of jargon and acronyms. Therefore, the two shorter versions might have a specialist micro vocabulary with a glossary attached. In addition we should consider the issue of interpolation or what I would call ecritology, the science of commentary and criticism. We may have consultations over White Papers but the answering facilities provided act only in respect of the questions posed. What about other commentaries on the original text? These are appropriate if a document is considered public property (as all governmental communications, by definition, should be). The technology exists to interpolate comments into texts, although this does raise some organisational problems centred around the power of context-sensitive searching and sorting. It also raises questions about intermediaries, which is our next topic. The Role of IntermediariesFor a useful example of what is wrong with public interest information flows, pick up a newspaper. Obviously, these are full of editing. But they also deal extensively in processes which should be characterised as clarification, simplification, amplification and interpretation. These are all valuable (if often abused) tools but they are meaningless without attribution. If I pick up a newspaper and read a story in which a speech is summarised, but can then get hold of the full text of the speech, the (potential) abuse of the editor is open to investigation. There are myriad examples of when later reporting of a statement bears little resemblance to its original (whether in the political sphere or outside). An obvious problem is that most people do not have the time, resources or inclination to check sources; this is not the fault of the newspaper or indeed our current, unsophisticated use of hypertext. Also, many speeches are simply not recorded verbatim. However, the real problem arises when there is deliberate non-attribution, as in "Sources said" or "Senior officials said". Translation without attribution is harmful, rather than simply inadequate. The use of digital media should mean that any textual adjustment to an original document can be checkable against the original. The identity of the translator should also be declared. Both the individual translator, and the change in medium (from speech to newspaper) are an intermediary stage in the text's journey from mind to mind: and interrogating the role and activity of any intermediary is a vital aspect of democracy. At the moment there is an intense discussion about the relationship between what are called impartial career civil servants, and political advisers, commonly known as 'spin doctors'. There are a large number of difficult issues to disentangle in this discussion so let me stick to three:
My answer to the first question is that the impartial civil servant is a myth which is perpetuated by the governing class to provide politicians with a safety net. There are all kinds of politics and turf wars within and between government departments, but the public face is not so much impartial as bland. The consultative process is, currently, largely a sham. I therefore believe that people with open political commitment are better moderators than those without; there is, after all, always the suspicion that the referee is biased. Such bias is not, of course, limited to governments or the civil service; the observation made above about newspapers suggests this. What we must be aware of is, first, the increasing importance of intermediaries in a world of ephemeral rather than definitive texts. Second, the increasing power of the facilities available to intermediaries, as information processing technology becomes more powerful. Both these factors mean that we need to think about the roles, training and accountability of intermediaries. But it seems clear that the ability to access previous versions of a text will inherently make intermediation of any kind more transparent. | |