Читать книгу Collins Improve Your Writing Skills - Graham King - Страница 21

. . . experience of managing a multicultural urban environment and the ability to integrate equalities considerations into areas of work activity.

This passage, from an advertisement for a Deputy Director of Social Services, is a real polysyllabic mess. Multicultural urban environment, despite modern delicacies, simply means racially-mixed part of town. Integrate here may mean build in, or it may have been misused to mean include.

Every trade and profession is entitled to its own jargon – up to a point. So let us allow that equalities is readily understood among social services people as meaning equal treatment regardless of race, sex and, probably, physical handicaps – although the singular equality serves the purpose as well, or better.

That passage, converted into plain English, could read:

. . . experience of dealing with a racially-mixed town area and ability to ensure that equality is part of departmental life.

The same advertisement also required ability to organise intervention in the community to establish the needs of potential service users. Meaning, presumably, ability to go out to discover what people need us to do.

Social workers do not have the field to themselves, when it comes to jargon. An advertisement for a health worker in Brazil announced:

You will assist the team in formulating and implementing a health policy, evaluating and developing appropriate responses to specific health problems in indigenous areas . . .

Meaning? Let’s try to translate: You will help to plan and carry out a policy to deal with health problems among local people. Such a simplification may create a problem, however; to jargon-hardened health workers the revised job description sounds as though it’s less important and so worth only half the salary of the inflated version.