Tag: Exports

Lost In Translations – The Dangers Of Being Misled By Them

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Lost In Translations – The Dangers Of Being Misled By Them

The issue of errors in translations, innocent as well as intentionally misleading ones, may soon become an even bigger issue. The U.S. Congress is providing money to produce many more of them:

The House bill introduced by Democratic Representatives Joaquin Castro and Bill Keating and Republicans Mike Gallagher and Brian Fitzpatrick would provide for the establishment of a federally funded Open Translation and Analysis Center (OTAC) focused on China.

It would be based on the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which provided translation and analysis of Soviet bloc and other foreign government media during the Cold War.

The bill calls for funding of $80 million for fiscal 2022 and that same amount annually for each fiscal year through 2026 as well as “such sums as may be necessary for each fiscal year thereafter.”

…

Referring to the acronyms of the People’s Republic of China and its ruling Communist Party and armed forces, the aide said OTAC would “systematically translate PRC/CCP/PLA speeches, documents, reports, strategies, news articles, commentaries, journal articles, procurement contracts into English and publish them freely online.”

…

Castro said that for the United States “to effectively both compete and cooperate with” countries like China and Russia it needed a better understanding of them.

“A nuanced understanding of foreign countries is impossible without reading how they communicate in their own languages,” he told Reuters.

Ecuador’s exporters caught between US and China after debt deal

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

Ecuador’s exporters caught between US and China after debt deal

The agreement, signed by the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and the Ecuadorean government just days before Donald Trump left office in January, envisages the US buying oil and infrastructure assets in Ecuador on the understanding Quito uses the proceeds to pay off its debt to China.

…

Adam Boehler, the recently departed chief executive of DFC, has described the deal as a “novel model” to eject China from the Latin American nation.

Related:

In Search of Tomorrow

US development bank strikes deal to help Ecuador pay China loans

IMF agrees to lend Ecuador $6.5bn

🤔💭

‘It All Comes Back to China’

Tina Marie (Ms. Cat)

‘It All Comes Back To China’

80% of the medications marketed in the US are manufactured offshore, 66% of those APIs come from China, and are then, often shipped to India, for final manufacture. Because of recalls and issues of quality, many drugs that we commonly use in hospitals have been in short supply for years. CIDRAP identified 156 medications “used in acute care that, if unavailable for a few hours or days, can lead to increased patient death rates.” Sixty have been unavailable off and on for years. More to the point

What we are seeing now is some products that are in a shortage and others that are in a very tight market,” he said. There was a 51 percent increase in demand for sedatives and anaesthetics in March, compared to the same period in January, before the coronavirus pandemic hit the US. Now, only 63 percent of these orders have been fulfilled. For analgesics, a kind of painkiller, demand rose by 67 percent. Orders for neuromuscular blockers, which relax muscles, rose 39 percent.