littleworkpage

Just as I thought that the muddle over conflict of interest was beginning to clear up a little because of the clarification from MND and from Madam Halimah, I have come across news (rather belatedly noticed by me) that Potong Pasir Town Council has appointed EM Services as the Managing Agent. On 21st May 2011, it was still being reported that the newly elected PAP MP Mr Sitoh Yi Pin was hoping to take over the management of the Town Council by the end of the month. It has been reported on 27th May that the Town Council has appointed EM Services. The following is from an article appearing on Channelnewsasia on 27 May 2011: Potong Pasir Town Council staff to be offered jobs by EM Services SINGAPORE: The Potong Pasir Town Council has engaged EM Services to be its managing agent. Town council Chairman and MP for the area, Sitoh Yih Pin, said there are currently 16 staff in the town council under its previous Chairman, Mr Chiam See Tong. And EM Services has accepted Mr Sitoh’s request to ...

Over the last week, this has become something of a pet issue for me. Is there or is there not any conflict of interest in the management of our Town Councils? The following article has appeared in Todayonline: MPs: No conflict of interest ... by Cheow Xin Yi 04:46 AM May 30, 2011 SINGAPORE - They are general managers accountable for the day-to-day administrative functions of town councils. Some of them are also employees of managing agents who win contracts from the town councils to service the estate. This arrangement - known to occur in at least four town councils in Singapore - has raised the issue of conflict of interest in town council management. At Aljunied and Jurong town councils, the respective GMs, Mr Jeffrey Chua and Mr Ho Thian Poh, in fact also hold the position of managing directors at CPG Facilities Management and UGL Premas. CPG is currently the managing agent of Aljunied Town Council, although it is not clear if the agreement will continue following the Workers' ...

Another Sunday, another dollar. Or złotówka, or euro... Those of you with children will no doubt have been to, or are planning to go to, some kind of family picnic or other sort of public party in honour of Children’s Day, which hits us this coming Wednesday. The Little Proofreaders had a fun time yesterday – despite the rain – at our local dwór, meeting Bolek i Lolek , listening to live music and munching parówki.   Meanwhile, work continues apace for the Big Proofreader; April and May are historically very busy months and this year has been no exception. Still, an end is in sight, which pleases my aching eyes and sore pupa, and worries my shrinking bank account. The srebrny lining to that impending chmura is that I have more time to think about the Article.   After a recent unexpected hiatus this month which precluded any posting for nearly two weeks, I was finally forced to admit that our so-far packed schedule would have to be trimmed further down. So from now on, the sche...

The more one digs the more finds….. Mr Ang Mong Seng, the former MP for Hong Kah GRC (Bukit Gombak) is named at the following website of United Fibre Systems Ltd as one of its Independent Directors. That is perfectly fine. http://www.ufs.com.sg/corp_team.html The write-up on that website says this about Mr Ang. "Mr. Ang is a Member of Parliament for Hong Kah GRC (Bukit Gombak). He has almost 30 years of experience in estate management. He is the Chief Operating Officer of EM Services Pte Ltd, Chairman of Hong Kah Town Council and Vice Chairman of South- West Community Development Council." He didn’t seek re-election this time around. So, the site is obviously not updated yet. But, note that he is referred to as the Chief Operating Officer of EM Services Pte Ltd. To be fair, the estate management of Hong Kah Town Council is provided by Esmaco Pte Ltd and not by EM Services Ltd. EM Services provides its services for the following Town Councils: East Coast Town Council Holla...

Based on reading an article in Temasek Review on 15th May 2011, I was under the impression that Esmaco is a company based in Australia and probably originating from there. http://www.temasekreview.com/2011/05/15/jurong-town-council-in-the-spotlight/ I managed to find out the following about Esmaco. Esmaco was originally owned by HDB Corporation Pte Ltd which then sold off its interest in Esmaco to Premas International Ltd. Premas International Ltd was a subsidiary of CapitaLand Ltd. CapitaLand had in 2005 sold Premas to United Group Limited (an Australian company). So, today... UGL Premas is the holding company and Esmaco is its subsidiary. It is likely that many of the staff and management in UGL Premas and Esmaco would have been the same chaps that were around prior to the divestment by CapitaLand. Mr Ho Thian Poh may well have been holding on to his position in Premas even before the acquisition by the Australian company and quite possibly he may have been the General MAnager...

For the last 20 to 25 years, I have had this feeling that our country had lost its soul. I might even add that maybe we didn’t really develop a soul after independence in 1965. We had become mere digits in a giant GDP focused machine. Many of my friends and some of my relatives have gone away to work overseas or have relocated and given up their citizenship. If you were to ask most of them what the reason for leaving was, one inevitable reason would be that our country was missing a soul. Some would talk about it in terms of the politics here. Others would lament the lack of a balanced lifestyle. Still others may speak of the lack of a creative environment. To me, these are all interrelated reasons. Our politics has stifled our cultural environment. The ruling party’s overriding focus on economic growth at the expense of everything else has stunted our development as a nation. After all these years of independence, why are we still not a nation yet? (Mr Lee Kuan Yew asserted...

Over the years, I’ve done a lot of recipes and restaurant menus, which is cool because a), I always enjoy reading about food and learning new recipes (I love to cook almost as much as I love to eat!), and b), such translations tend to touch on a variety of languages all in one go (Italian, French etc).   In all that time, one thing that I’ve often seen and that makes my teeth itch whenever I see it, is dag , and the bastardised plural form, dags . To me, Dags is a made-up sweet form of Dagmara. I have neighbours and colleagues called Dagmara, and I call ‘em Dags. It’s also a mis-spelling of dogs, or a literal spelling of that word in various Irish dialects.   One thing it’s not though, is a unit of measurement for English speakers. Professor Wiktoria Pedia tells us that a dag is the “symbol for decagram, a unit of mass equal to ten grams.” In other words, 1 dag (common Polish term) equals 1 decagram (common English term), which equals 10 grams .   Note that in Brit...

A couple of interesting revelations have arisen after the general elections in Singapore this year. These are worth pursuing in the interest of transparency. In the end, I suspect that there may not be anything to be concerned about. But, prima facie, there appears to be a potential for conflict of interest in the management of some town councils. I am not prepared to jump the gun and declare that there has been an obvious case of conflict. There are so many details that are missing that it is impossible to state with any degree of certainty whether conflict might exist. Soon after the elections, information surfaced that the General Manager of Aljunied GRC was also the Managing Director of CPG Facilites Management Pte Ltd. This is the company that was awarded the town management contract at Aljunied Town Council. Now that Aljunied has fallen to the opposition Workers Party, there will be a handover of the Town Council management pretty soon. In an article in the Straits Times...

‘Better late than never’ is a common English idiom, often used by people embarrassedly giving you a birthday present or anniversary congratulations days or weeks after the event. And so it is with some small degree of embarrassment that I present our next translating item for your consideration, somewhat later than I would have liked had real life not once again grabbed me by the collar and stuck a big gun loaded with commitments between my shoulder blades!   Never mind though, because this is a BIG one, and if you’re going to claim any right to those degrees hanging on your wall (or rolled up and shoved in a drawer – apparently not everyone feels the need to frame their diplomas), then like James Bond in Q’s office before another exciting mission, you must “pay attention”!   Seriously, this is a big one, one of the universal errors which everyone everywhere makes when coming into English from another language. The culprit today is also , and the charge is Appearing in all the...

PAP is singing the tune of change... As for myself, I would love to see the following changes. But, I already suspect that none of these would transpire until more opposition voices enter Parliament. (or the PAP is voted out of power) 1. Abolish detention without trial 2. Repeal the mandatory death penalty 3. Repeal s.377A of the Penal Code 4. Amend laws that reverse the burden of proof and place the same on the defendant. (e.g. Misuse of Drugs Act) 5. relinquish control over the local media by repealing the Newspapers and Printing Presses Act 6. Politicians should cease to institute defamation suits 7. Lay bare the accounts of Temasek Holdings and GIC and specifically set out the salaries of office bearers 8. Reveal the details of our national reserve 9. reveal the per unit cost of construction of HDB flats 10. what component of CPF monies are invested by the state and what are the returns on the investment 11. Amend the Films Act to make it compliant with the Constitution 12. Ame...

The catchword for GE 2011 has become ‘change’. Whatever else may or may not have happened and whatever change may be due to take place, the political landscape in Singapore has changed irrevocably in a noticeably powerful way. Our collective fear of the PAP has been smashed in a dramatic fashion. I know that a significant number of people still experience that fear. However, thanks to the social media, for many of us this general election campaign has enabled us to find a voice and a very loud one at that. All of this noise making has, it appears, forced the PAP leadership to re-examine itself. It is too early to tell if the PAP leaders would in fact change their policies and modify their authoritarian style of government. I am still skeptical. We have heard before about the supposed change in the style of government. But, past actions do not bear out any real attempt at fulfilling those promises. As it stands right now, it appears to me still that the leadership is engaged in...

The Group Representation Constituency system was introduced in the 1988 elections ostensibly for the purpose of ensuring minority representation in Parliament. In the 2011 general elections, the PAP has lost 2 of its ministers through the loss of Aljunied GRC. The Workers’ Party raised the stakes by placing its best candidates in Aljunied knowing that the closet election battle in the last election was fought in this GRC. They won the bet. Now, more than ever before, there is an urgent need to talk about the GRC system. There is an urgency to deal with this system whilst PAP supporters themselves are bitter with the loss of George Yeo. For a long time, opposition supporters have maintained that the GRC system unfairly disadvantages opposition parties and favours the incumbent. Well, it is equally dangerous for the PAP: the loss of a GRC means the loss of at least one or two ministers depending on the particular GRC. Let us examine the stated rationale for the GRC system and whe...

Discussion of misdirection and distraction has turned up in several contexts during my recent reading, in several contexts Magic - "One of the most important things to remember when thinking about misdirection and magic is this: a larger movement conceals a smaller movement" (from Wikipedia) Literature - "Misdirection is also a literary device most commonly employed in detective fiction, where the attention of the reader is deliberately focused on a red herring in order to conceal the identity of the murderer" (from Wikipedia). Of course, many other genres use the device too - e.g. a title has an extra meaning that's only revealed at the end. Writing Poetry - "It is difficult to select just a couple moments in Larkin's work where he employs this strategy of misdirection because it is so often the case. Nevertheless, I will begin with a poem from The Whitsun Weddings called "Water" where the strategy is hard to miss. In it the speaker create...

The 7th of May has come and gone. Many of us were harping on the message of change. For some, it was as grandiose as a defeat of the PAP and the formation of a coalition government. For others, it was about denying the PAP a 2/3 majority. But, I believe, for most it was about making a breakthrough in a GRC. In the heat of the campaigning, it was becoming increasingly clear from all the noise-making on social media platforms such as Facebook and from all the conversations that we were having with friends and relatives that something was happening. There was a shift against the PAP. A wave of anger. This was made worse by the almost arrogant insistence by Ministers that there would be no policy shifts and the veiled and direct threats that were made to the electorate generally and to voters in Aljunied in particular. For a while, some of us sensed that Holland-Bukit Timah might fall to SDP in addition to a victory for the Workers’ Party in Aljunied. As more and more of us raised...

Not much to report today. Been busy with the ol' freelance stuff, most of which has consisted of extracting images from Polish PDFs and applying a fresh coat of English to their labels and signs. Always good fun because it's quite relaxing. The key is to use programmes you're comfortable with, and NOT get suckered in on the ground floor by PhotoShop if you're new to image editing. A better option is to start here , with Paint Dot Net. In other news, our friends over at the FaceBook group Tłumacze z polskiego report the sad demise of the University of Westminster's MA Conference Interpreting course. Happily though, they seem to be replacing it with MA Interpreting . At any rate, Westminster is a very good school for linguists, so if you're thinking of going abroad to continue your education in this kind of direction, give them a look, here . Anyway, must dash. Rest assured that there will be a few interesting things coming up this week, new items that I've b...

Wow, what a week! Last Sunday seems like a long way away, and since then it’s been a non-stop Sajgon on all fronts – hence the lack of new material this week. So, in time-honoured tradition, it’s time to re-heat and re-serve some previous meals in the Bad Microwave.   To this end, here are my top five issues that have featured on the blog so far. If you’re new to the Article, or have missed a few weeks etc, then just reading these five things will be a shot in the arm for your translating armoury. (Wow, talk about a mixed metaphor).   Here we go then – five of the most thorny issues in PL>EN translation, as featured on the Bad Article so far (this doesn’t excuse you from reading everything else, top-to-bottom ;) Using in the case of , when in case of is what you want , Mixing up since and from when describing elapsed time , Over-punctuating around brackets , Using persons when people is more appropriate , Over- and mis-use of appreciate and cooperate ...