Guest Post: Passion to Specialisation by Alastair Naughton

I have a personal interest in public transport as, for medical reasons, I am not allowed to drive. This is also one of the reasons working from home as a freelancer is a particularly good fit for me. That is before we even mention my love for the German language. As a part of my undergraduate degree I spent a semester at the University of Hanover, and during my PhD I spent a research year at the Heinrich Heine Universität, Düsseldorf.

While in Germany I was able to observe how much better public transport works there than here. It is perhaps because I am dependent on public transport that I am particularly interested in this subject as a translator. However, if we want to promote public transport, it will take a massive investment of not just financial, but also of political capital over many years. The most important and most difficult step will be to persuade people to consider forms of transport other than the private car. We will have to do this anyway, if we want to stay on course to meet our obligations under the Paris Climate Change Agreement.

Reducing Car Use – A personal passion

Under the Paris Agreement, all the signatory countries, which includes the UK, are committed to keeping global warming over the next century to well below 2 %, and if possible, to just 1.5 %. With CO2 emissions being one of the primary causes of global warming, it is worth noting that the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that cars and trucks account for nearly one fifth of all CO2 emissions in the US.1 So, what can be done to turn this around? First of all, here are a few statistics to bear in mind:2

• A bus with as few as seven passengers is more fuel efficient than a car carrying one person.

• A fully occupied train is on average fifteen times more fuel efficient than a car.

• Buses produce just 20 % of the carbon monoxide per passenger mile of a single occupant car.

This is all quite apart from the negative impact of more road building, which in turn takes its toll on the environment. On the other hand the positive benefits (from a safety and noise point of view) of having fewer cars on the streets is undeniable. It would therefore seem like a no-brainer to invest more money in public transport, and hey presto, problem solved. However, it’s not as simple as that.

Firstly, it is unacceptable that private bus companies perform public service functions. First Aberdeen is a prime example of how NOT to run a service for the benefit of the public, and if you want to convert car owners to bus use, then forget it! And understandably so. I could write a book about its failings; suffice to say that some of its fleet are twenty years out of date, with most at least eleven or twelve years old.

Secondly, there is the practically non-existent rail network. The damage started with Lord Beeching in the 1960s, who, in the name of progress, decided that a third of the country’s rail system needed to be ripped up because it wasn’t profitable. One such line was the Royal Deeside Line. At the time of its closure, the trip from the outskirts of Aberdeen into the city centre took just 18 minutes. Today, the same trip, in the rush hour, by bus, on a congested main road takes nearly an hour! Even today, for longer journeys, prices are likely to be so prohibitively expensive that no-one could reasonably criticise anyone for making a long-distance journey in the comfort of a car instead of forking out the cost of a train fare. (It beggars belief that a return flight from Aberdeen to Hanover is about £80 cheaper than a return train journey from Aberdeen to Bristol).

So, what to do? It goes without saying that massive investment in all forms of public transport is required. Bus and rail networks are perhaps the most important in terms of getting people away from the use of the private car. However, if we are serious about getting cars off the road, we need to make buses and trains not only more attractive but also more affordable.

We also need to look at cycling and walking. Cycle paths are protected in Germany, as they are in most European countries. It would be unthinkable for a bike to use the same dedicated lane as the city’s buses in Germany, yet this is Aberdeen City Council’s idea of how cyclists should get around the city centre! Don’t you feel the health benefits as you breathe in all that bus exhaust, fellow cyclists? I think not! We need the pedestrianisation of city centres on a major scale as part of a plan to make walking more attractive. But if you want to get any benefits from walking or cycling, you need to address the dangers from traffic, which can only be done by reducing the volume of traffic on the road, which de facto means private car usage, as well as moving freight from HGVs onto trains.

There’s a massive amount we could do, but it takes money and a change of mindset by everyone – politicians, the public, the press, everyone – to make it a reality. It needs massive investment backed up by political commitment to stay the course. Otherwise the planet will continue to fry.


About Alastair (anaughton02@gmail.com)

Alastair Naughton is a freelance translator working from German into English with a particular interest in the environment, including sustainable development. He lives and works in Aberdeen in the North East of Scotland and has a total of six years’ translation experience.




References:
  1 Union of Concerned Scientists Website https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/car-emissions-and-global-warming
 
 2 State of Delaware Government Website http://www.dnrec.delaware.gov/dwhs/info/Pages/OzonePublicTrans.aspx

Guest Post: How did I get here? by Andrew Fenner

Preamble: it ain't necessarily so

Before going any further, there's something I'd like to say. One thing I have noticed in the course of my life is that most, if not all, of what I was taught from childhood onwards is misleading, if not actually wrong. The opposite is sometimes true.

Such implied maxims include:

·       "Work hard if you want to succeed". That's not necessarily true. What you have to do is work clever. Also, working (over) hard can be fatal: to quote James Thurber, "Early to rise and early to bed, make a man healthy, wealthy and dead."

·       "You need to conform to succeed". 

·       "You need to be sociable, fit in, etc. etc." (You can imagine the rest. If I could summarise them, I'd say, "Life is deadly serious")

I didn't set out to break these 'rules', I've just found that they don't always work, not for me anyway.

And now a plug: time and time again, I've recommended the book, "What Color is Your Parachute?" by a guy called Richard Nelson Bolles. His primary thesis is counter-intuitive: by trying to be like everyone else, you are de facto competing with everyone else; focus instead on being yourself as much as you can be, there aren't many people like you. He wrote this mainly for jobseekers, but ultimately it implies we should work for ourselves.

How I went freelance

It was May 1984. I was 35, half the Biblical lifespan of three score years and ten. I was sitting in our front room and I thought, "I've spent half my life doing what other people want me to do. I'm going to spend the rest of my life doing what I want to do."

Notice that I didn't include anything about how I was going to do that. I'd actually been wanting to do it for the last six months. I'd been chronically sick with minor but persistent complaints such as colds, then in May it suddenly seemed the time was right. So I did it.

I felt strangely weightless. If you're 'in work', there's a certain logic: do this, get that. If you work for yourself, there's no such framework, there's no-one to tell you what to do. Then again, there's no-one to tell you what not to do.

I'd been thinking of using my languages for some time. I hadn't used them directly before, but I'd passed the Institute of Linguists Final Diploma examination in 1982. I'd even taught German at evening classes. I thought I was mad. I had no clients, no contacts, nothing, but it felt right.

I wrote to various agencies I found in the Yellow Pages. I had to support myself in the meantime, so I took up public survey work with what was then Ken Livingstone's GLC. This lasted over the summer, but then dried up. So I was faced with a dilemma: should I return to being employed, or should I persist in trying to be freelance?

(I have found from other people I have spoken to who went freelance that they found a similar phenomenon: the 'honeymoon period' when you are still 'in love' with being free tends to last about six months, but work won't necessarily have started coming in by then. You need to be prepared for this if it happens and not be frightened by it. You can get through it.)

(Another point to note is that it is better not to think of yourself in terms of what you do, but who you are. I may be lucky here: I've had three lives, living in Germany, printing and being freelance. The first thing you need to do before anything else is survive. The rest is academic.)

How did I get into law?

As work came in, I found that a lot of the documents I was being asked to translate (not surprisingly, perhaps) were legal, mainly contracts and disputes. I was appalled by the thought that I was translating these without any specialist knowledge or training; so I attended a Postgraduate Certificate in Law course in London for two years part time. It was hard work, but I really enjoyed it, and I've found since that I must have absorbed more than I thought. I've also attended a number of courses in French and German law and international law. I will never know as much as a practising solicitor, the German term 'angelernt' (often translated as 'semi-skilled', but seems more like 'learning in-process'), but I've worked with lawyers in this country and abroad and they seemed to accept what I do.

 


About Andrew (andrewjfenner@aol.com):

I was born in London, but only really came alive when I went to live in Germany. I came back and went to college but didn't like it. I didn't know what to do, ended up working in a factory and writing and self-publishing a short story which I'm proud to say was then 'discovered' and published properly as an adult literacy text ("George and the Bus"). That got me into printing, which I really enjoyed, and I stayed there for ten years, although I studied for and passed the Institute of Linguists' Final Diploma in 1982. (I also taught some German evening classes.) Then I decided I'd spent enough time working for other people, so I went freelance (in 1984), and I've been translating ever since. I've been interested in palaeontology (I found a Stone Age tool on a beach in Ireland), and I'm fascinated by how animals communicate, and whether we can communicate with them (non-verbally).