Monday, 15 June 2009

Meaningless/Misleading Statistic Of The Day (2)

From the BBC, 12 December 2006:

More than £100m of public money is spent on translation services in the UK, the BBC has learned. Local authorities spend £25m, NHS trusts £55m and the courts £31m on interpreting languages.

From The Torygraph*, 13 June 2009:

Town halls and Whitehall spend £50 million a year on translation and interpretation for the benefit of people who cannot speak English.

D'you see what they did there? They just dropped NHS costs (which includes shit like translating 'England goes smoke-free' leaflets into 22 languages) out of the equation, and hey presto, they've halved the total cost!

* Via Obo.

1 comments:

neil craig said...

Also that in both cases the headline has rounded the total down.

Fits well with your subsequent article about boots since there is no reason to believe that either figure includes everything.