| McLoughlin of Arabia: memoirs of an interpreter Engaging autobiography is fascinating for anyone who has grappled with the mysteries and beauties of ArabicOn the face of it there was little in Leslie McLoughlin's background that prepared him for a lifetime revolving around the Arab world and the Arabic language – except that coming from a family divided between rural Lancashire and Liverpool he had a good ear for linguistic nuances that was useful as he knuckled down to his schoolboy Latin and French.McLoughlin first fell under the "spell of far Arabia" when he noticed his father using exotic words such as "bint," "shufti" and "yallah" – brought home from Egypt and the western desert in the second world war. The origins of the names of Indian and Pakistani cricketers such as Mushtaq Ali and Abdul Rahman fascinated him too. So in 1960, after national service, he rejoined the army to study Arabic at Durham University and then taught it to soldiers in the dying days of British control of Aden, Oman and the Gulf.Later he taught at the Foreign Office's Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies (Mecas) in Shemlan, Lebanon, the famous "school for spies" where generations of British Arabists practised their trilateral roots and conversational skills for cocktail party circuit and souk. Mecas, with an atmosphere like "a well-run officers' mess", survived temporary relocation to the UK during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war despite the lack of native speakers in Buckinghamshire. But the Lebanese civil war finished it off.Natural discretion and the Official Secrets Act have prevented McLoughlin from spilling many beans about his 20 years as an interpreter for British ministers and Arab VIPs. (The titillating "confessions" in the title of his book is thus a tad misleading.) It would have been fascinating to hear a fly on the wall account of talks between Margaret Thatcher and the Saudi royals about the massive al-Yamamah arms deal; or a frank report on what happened when Saddam Hussein's deputy came to Downing Street to negotiate UK export credits during the war with Iran.Still, this engaging autobiography is fascinating and fun for anyone who has grappled with the mysteries and beauties of Arabic and wants to hear from an expert practitioner how teaching methods have evolved in recent years.McLoughlin is good on the frustratingly wide gap between literary and spoken Arabic in its regional variations from Kuwait to Morocco. He reports the magnificent put-down of an old school academic – a world-renowned expert on early Islam – who advised him sniffily to take a course with Berlitz if he wanted to actually speak Arabic. The professor gratifyingly relented later and admitted that it does make sense to stray from Qur'anic exegesis and learn to speak from the very beginning.Interpretation from any language involves pitfalls but there are always special sensitivities in the Middle East. McLoughlin has a lovely anecdote about a minister whose strong Scottish accent misled an interpreter into rendering the anodyne phrase "Britain's role in the Gulf" as the explosive "Britain's rule in the Gulf" – obviously not a welcome idea east of Suez in post-colonial days.Arabists of all levels will enjoy the convoluted translation of the ubiquitous and marvellously expressive word "ya'ani" (literally "it means") by a super-cautious Saudi interpreter during a fraught diplomatic exchange: "Having regard to all the circumstances and taking into account the probable ramifications of what you suggested we would prefer to reserve our position." McLoughlin points too to the problem of serious confusion over the word "if" in written Arabic – "idha maa" – which, infuriatingly, in ordinary spoken Arabic means "if not". It's surprising that misunderstanding between Arabic speakers and others isn't even greater than it is.Knowing a foreign language is supposed to be a handy weapon in the struggle that is life. Except, of course, when it actually turns out to be dangerous to its user. McLoughlin, perhaps wisely, doesn't dwell on this disconcerting point when he describes fleeing Lebanon with his family when the security situation deteriorated in 1976. The trick was to pretend, for their own safety, that they were monoglots who didn't speak a word of Arabic. They were relieved to hear a gunman shout: "Let them go, they're English and don't know what's going on." They crossed the border unscathed into Syria.Confessions of an Arabic Interpreter: The Odyssey of an Arabist, 1959-2009, Motivate PublishingMiddle EastIan Blackguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
UK carbon label sales 'top £2bn' Sales of products carrying a label that shows the goods' carbon footprint are set to pass £2bn-a-year, say the scheme's operators. bbc.co.uk |
George Osborne's plans will be in tatters when global economic war erupts | Will Hutton As America and China square up, the chancellor is ignoring the bigger picture with his ill-advised spending reviewThose who run the International Monetary Fund are supreme financial diplomats. They talk the opaque language of financial final communiques, the honed compromises between the great economic powers.So when Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the IMF managing director, acknowledged that the language of a recent IMF summit communique was "ineffective", that the time for "real action" had come and that he feared "a race to the bottom" as the major countries began to outdo each other in beggar-my-neighbour currency wars, you should sit up and listen. The problem is that we can talk and talk and talk, he said, but in the end something has to happen – and it has not. If countries chose not to co-operate in unravelling the problems facing the world economy, we all faced disaster.The United States blames China for the impasse, saying it was manipulating its currency to export unemployment to stagnation-stricken America. China blames the US for flooding the world with dollars and taking no responsibility as the hegemonic power for the fiscal and monetary discipline necessary to underpin the world's key currency. Fears are growing that next month's G20 meeting in Seoul will reveal the lack of co-operation.It was the collapse of collaboration at the London summit in 1931 that launched the trade and currency policies that prolonged depression. Will history repeat itself? The US is preparing to declare unilateral economic war on China by further swelling the flood of dollars when next month it adopts an American form of quantitative easing to boost anaemic levels of bank lending. China will be swamped by yet more dollars displaced from the US, but is determined, as the governor of the Bank of China, Zhou Xiaochuan, repeated, to move with extreme gradualism on its currency, if it moves at all. Both, as in the early 1930s, imagine they can get better results by going it alone. And if they square up to each other, the rest of the world has no option but to protect itself, the dynamic that caused the competitive devaluations and trade protection of the 1930s.This is the background to this week's statement by chancellor George Osborne in which he will announce the fastest, deepest cuts in public spending ever mounted by a government in modern times. Given the risks, the right policy would have been to embed flexibility in Britain's spending, taxing and borrowing plans so the government could move fast to adjust to whatever happens. It is not what will be announced.There was no need for such haste. Just as we took a decade to solve our problems after the crises of the mid-1970s and early 1990s, so we could have done the same today – aggressively cutting the deficit only when recovery is more assured. After all, it has never been easier to sell government debt. Equally, if more of the burden of deficit reduction had been shouldered by planned tax increases, they could have been quickly deferred or abandoned to boost the economy if world economic prospects darkened. The haste to cut so blindly and so crudely, unless we are very lucky, will be seen by future historians as one of the great acts of economic folly.Optimists insist China and the US will draw back from economic war and that the risks are manageable. The Chinese have let the yuan go up by 2% over the last two months, and are pledged to lower their trade surplus. After all, with foreign exchange reserves of $2.6 trillion, the highest of any country in history, the only way China can carry on acquiring reserves on this scale without risking massive inflation is through even more draconian controls on its banking system.Change would seem rational. On Friday, President Obama deferred for another 90 days the launch of another weapon in the US's economic arsenal – naming China as a currency manipulator and unilaterally imposing American tariffs on Chinese imports – in the hope that China was retreating. There could yet be a deal in Korea.But China's economic model is built on sky-high saving and phenomenal export growth, especially to the US. Only last month, the US recorded its second-biggest monthly trade deficit; more than half was with China. Any bargain that makes sense requires China to spend more, save and export less and the US to spend less and export more.A US in the grip of the rising Tea party movement is hardly likely to embark on the reforms required to make the US a more compatible trade and currency partner. It will do whatever it needs to protect American growth and jobs – and the rest of the world can adjust to it. This, after all, is what the pre-Tea party US did to Japan in the late 1980s, forcing the yen to rise sharply, triggering a profound financial and banking crisis that delivered nearly two decades of economic stagnation. Now the Chinese fear that an even more aggressive US wants to do the same to them and that US quantitative easing is its chosen weapon.The Chinese Communist party could not survive two decades of Japanese-style stagnation, nor could it survive an upsurge in inflation. Its legitimacy is based on its capacity to deliver economically, not on bankrupt communist ideology. Nor can it easily boost Chinese consumer spending without establishing property rights and proper welfare with the accompanying rise in taxes, an existential threat to the regime.In any case, we do not live in multilateral, international deal-making times. The Doha round of trade talks has been deadlocked for a decade. There is no agreement on climate change. Effective nuclear nonproliferation remains elusive. In the EU, member states take their cue from Eurosceptics jealously protecting national sovereignty. Unless something changes dramatically, it is hard to see how China and the US can do anything else but remain, at best, deadlocked, at worst, sliding towards economic war.Britain should be doing all in its power to avoid this disaster and to have a plan B to protect itself if disaster strikes. We should be offering to play our full part in any world deal to buy time for the US and China to change, while making sure we can act fast and flexibly to respond to a climate of beggar-my-neighbour trade and currency policies. The spending review should have been framed to allow Britain to play its part in boosting world demand, help the world arrive at the compromises necessary to sustain economic order and make our recovery more secure. It will not be. The coalition has many admirable aims and that two political parties can work together so effectively is refreshing. But everything is being put at risk by once again kowtowing to the gods of financial orthodoxy. That was always wrong in the past. It is no less wrong today.George OsborneSpending review 2010ChinaBarack ObamaRecessionEconomic policyWill Huttonguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Democrats in denial over midterm elections As he continues his US road trip, Gary Younge meets Democratic activists in Colorado and asks how they're facing the possible threat of a Republican takeover on election dayGary YoungeLaurence Topham guardian.co.uk |
Airport Security Burden Questioned European air officials accused the U.S. of imposing useless and overly intrusive security measures, calling for the Obama administration to reexamine post-9/11 policies. online.wsj.com |