In a previous post, I noted that in the reports of President Bush's remarks at Gleneagles on the events of 7/7, there are roughly as many different versions of the quotes as there are sources. I focused on a particular phrase that Eric Bakovic found politically revealing. My sample of journalistic versions of that phrase:
New York Times: you have people working to alleviate poverty and rid the world of the pandemic of AIDS and ways to have a clean environment
Financial Times: we are working on solving the pandemic of Aids and ways to have a clean environment
Cox News Service: we have people here who are working to alleviate poverty, to help rid the world of the pandemic of AIDS, working on ways to have a clean environment
Ireland On-Line: you’ve got people here who are working to alleviate poverty, help rid the world of the pandemic of Aids, and are working on ways to have a clean environment
Australian Broadcasting Corporation: you've got people here who are working to alleviate poverty, to help rid the world of the pandemic of AIDS, working on ways to have a clean environment
White House: we have people here who are working to alleviate poverty, to help rid the world of the pandemic of AIDS, working on ways to have a clean environment
I found an audio clip of the statement on CSPAN, and was not surprised to learn that all of these versions are wrong.
My transcription of the relevant phrases
you got people here who are workin' to alleviate poverty
and uh help uh rid the world of the pandemic of AIDS
and they're workin' on ways to have a clean environment
Normalizing the morphology, eliminating disfluencies and adding standard punctuation -- as I'd expect a journalist to do -- we get
you've got people here who are working to alleviate poverty and help rid the world of the pandemic of AIDS, and they're working on ways to have a clean environment
None of the sources got this right, though the Financial Times was the worst, with the New York Times in second-worst position. We can line up the NYT (blue) with the truth (red) as follows
you have people working to alleviate poverty you've got people here who are working to alleviate poverty and rid the world of the pandemic of AIDS and help rid the world of the pandemic of AIDS and ways to have a clean environment and they're working on ways to have a clean environment
If Alan Cowell (the NYT reporter) were a speech recognition system, I'd score him as having 2 substitutions and 7 deletions in a phrase with 30 lexical tokens, for a WER ("word error rate") of 9/30 = 30%.
The content of Bush's remarks is preserved, in my opinion, but the form is pretty seriously mangled. Linguists -- and Jacob Weisberg -- beware!
For the record, here's my transcript of the whole statement. I've put in a newline wherever there was a silent pause.
spent some time recently with the Prime Minister
uh Tony Blair
had an opportunity to express our
heartfelt condolences
to the
people of London
people who lost lives
I appreciate uh Prime Minister Blair's
steadfast determination
and strength
he's on his way now
uh to London
((give)) from the G8 to speak directly to the people *of* London
he'll carry a message of solidarity with him
((uh)) this morning I
been in contact with our homeland security folks
I instructed them to be in touch with
((uh)) local and state officials
uh ((uh)) about
the facts of what took place here and in London
uh and uh
to uh
be extra vigilant
uh as uh our folks
uh start heading to work
you know the contrast uh
between what
we've seen on the TV screens here
uh what's taken place in London
what's taking place here is
incredibly vivid to me
on the one hand
you got people here who are workin' to alleviate poverty
and uh
help uh
rid the world of the pandemic of AIDS
and they're workin' on
ways to have a clean environment
and on the other hand you got people killin' innocent people
the contrast couldn't be clearer
between the intentions
uh and the uh hearts
of those of us who
care deeply about human rights ((and))
human liberty
and those who kill
those who got such evil in their heart
that they uh
they will uh
take the lives of innocent folks
uh this is uh the war on terror goes on
I was much impressed by the resolve of the
all the leaders in the room
uh their resolve is as strong as *my* resolve
and that is we will
uh not yield to these people
will not yield to the terrorists
we will find them, we will bring them to justice
and at the same time we will spread uh
uh an ideology of
hope
and compassion
that will overwhelm their ideology of hate
thank you very much
Posted by Mark Liberman at July 9, 2005 11:29 AM