Letters to the editor

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Africa’s debt burden

Your article about the World Bank struggling to serve all 78 poor countries was right to call out the debt crisis that developing states face (“Stretched thin”, December 14th). African governments pay much higher interest rates on loans than Western governments and can pay sky-high yields on government bonds, whereas the average for Europe and North America in 2021 was 1.1%. Developing countries paid a staggering $1.4trn in foreign-debt servicing in 2023. Of Africa’s 35 low-income countries, 19 are in debt distress.

This burden of external sovereign debt is a barrier to achieving sustainable development and climate resilience, diverting resources away from critical investments in health, education and infrastructure.

The recent $100bn replenishment of the World Bank’s International Development Association fell short of the $120bn that African leaders called for, but it is nonetheless an important step forward in addressing the crises the continent faces and should be celebrated. The IDA must now be leveraged to achieve an even greater impact, prioritising African-led initiatives and addressing the climate needs of the most vulnerable on our continent.

William Ruto
President of Kenya
Nairobi

Elon Musk is half right

Although Elon Musk’s electoral recommendations in Germany are flawed, his article in Welt correctly articulated the feelings of many Germans that the four main centrist parties have proved that they are not up to the enormous task of getting the country back on track economically and geopolitically (“Muskular intervention”, January 4th). The centre-left is hooked on unsustainable welfare spending, a ballooning bureaucracy that sucks up ever more of Germany’s precious talent and an economic doctrine based on subsidies. The centre-right is religiously wedded to the debt brake, which stifles badly needed public investment in infrastructure and education, and still has not understood that German industry is struggling with new technologies precisely because it has constantly been mollycoddled and “protected” from change.

Although the conclusion Mr Musk draws is hopelessly illogical and inaccurate, it reflects the justified exasperation of the German public with centrist parties and much of the country’s media for being infuriatingly unwilling to face the music. Exhibit A is the op-ed editor who resigned over the publication of Mr Musk’s piece. The childish reaction of Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz unfortunately confirms not only populists’ claim that free speech is under attack, but worse, that Mr Musk may be right after all in calling for a radical political shift. Should it stick, the blame is on them.

Veit Ulbricht
Düsseldorf

Sulphur pollution

Cleaning up the air reduces sulfate pollution and this unmasks hidden warming (“Of clouds and Crutzen”, December 21st). As Paul Crutzen noted, the best way to slow warming is to limit all climate pollutants. Indeed, four times more warming can be avoided over the next two decades by cutting methane and other short-lived climate super pollutants compared with the targeting of only carbon-dioxide emissions.

The Montreal Protocol, an international treaty to protect the ozone, is already eliminating hydrofluorocarbons, one of the climate super pollutants, illustrating how similar sectoral strategies could cut other super pollutants. The protocol was catalysed by Crutzen, Mario Molina, and Sherwood Rowland, co-recipients of the Nobel prize in chemistry. Thanks to their efforts, the protocol has put the stratospheric ozone layer on the path to recovery by mid-century, while avoiding the warming that could have been equal to what carbon dioxide causes. The protocol’s current science team is studying the risk to the ozone layer of injecting sulfates into the stratosphere to cool the planet, a strategy that may yet be needed.

Durwood Zaelke
President

Gabrielle Dreyfus
Chief scientist
Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development
Washington, DC

The unsaid factor in 2024

I find it amazing that your leader on “What to make of 2024” (December 21st) did not mention Joe Biden, even though you squeezed in your endorsement of Kamala Harris. The Democratic Party and most of the media covered up the senility of Mr Biden and told us that he was at the top of his game until they could no longer perpetuate that lie. Mr Biden had a profound impact on the presidential election. And his lack of leadership contributed to the course of wars and actions taken by dictators around the world.

Frank Haimbach
Delray Beach, Florida

Carter was no rube

I enjoyed your obituary on Jimmy Carter (January 4th), but it was wrong to characterise him as “unintellectual…whose formation had been in the navy, not university”. This was a man who graduated in the top 10% of his class from the US Naval Academy (surely a university by anyone’s standards) and who briefly worked in the department designing America’s first nuclear-powered submarines. He furthermore devoted much of his long life to serious thought about the solutions to society’s big problems. Does one have to attend Georgetown and Yale Law to be considered an “intellectual”?

Alan Supple
Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Lost in AI translation

“The Babel wish” (December 14th) repeated a company’s claim that its machine-translation software is better than human translators. I would be cautious about that, since such claims have been made in the past and then debunked. You also said that human checking of AI machine translation adds little value. But remember that AI systems can go off the rails and make serious errors, so that even if human checking does nothing in 90% (or even 99%) of cases, it still is important for the remaining 10% (or 1%).

Ehud Reiter
Professor of computing science
University of Aberdeen

The adage goes that translations can be good, fast and cheap, but you can only ever pick two of the three. AI currently has the last two covered, but what’s to stop providers jacking up prices once they have a stranglehold on the market? A similar AI takeover and subsequent supply shrinkage has already happened in the transcription industry, and now users who have been hit with extortionate increases in licence fees are looking to rehire human transcribers, only to find that they have long since moved on.

I have yet to see a single piece of raw machine output that hasn’t required complete rewriting. I recently received a request to “tidy up” a machine translation, yet there were a number of issues that would not have been present in a human translation, such as missingspaces betweenwords, full stops in strange. places, medical terminology translated differently from one line to the next, and nonsensical sentences talking about “establishing the abdomen” (the correct translation was “establishing pneumoperitoneum”).

Admittedly this was a technical document, but as you say, even the simplest of tasks can trip the machine up. If even that proves problematic, would you be comfortable leaving your legal contract, nuclear-safety testing procedures, medical-device instructions or marketing campaign to a machine? The sad reality of all this is that more than half the freelance translators questioned in a recent survey are considering leaving the industry, and can you blame us?

Lee Anderson
Co-founder
Word of Mouth Translations
London

The real Top Gun

Bartleby’s column on nicknames (December 21st) made me think of my career as a fighter pilot in the navy. The fighter squadron is a tight-knit group that trains, deploys, fights, and in some cases, dies together. As a result, each pilot carries a call sign with them throughout their career. Unlike the movies, the call sign is given to you and is rarely as cool as “Maverick” or “Iceman” (unless you are in the air force, in which case you will meet many “Vipers” and “Killers”).

Some of my favourites were acronyms, such as SYPHIN, which stands for Shut Your Pie Hole Ignorant Nugget (Nugget is the term for a new aviator). This is given to someone who tries to “fix” the squadron five minutes after joining it. And there were simple plays on last names, such as NOTSO Swift. Some think this tradition is demeaning and exclusionary. In fact, as Bartleby pointed out so well, when done properly it does just the opposite. If the call sign is given from the bottom-up and not the top-down, it makes one feel part of the group faster. Everyone has endured a call sign that may not be to their liking. The only thing worse is the group not giving you one at all.

Mark Swinger
Retired commander, US Navy
Springfield, Virginia

After reading Bartleby’s nicknames for buildings I recalled the acerbic description of the Transamerica building by Herb Caen, the supreme arbiter of all things San Franciscan. The beloved columnist labelled the new triangular pyramid arising from San Francisco’s financial district in the 1970s, as the world’s greatest dunce cap. City fathers were not amused.

Linda Nakamura
San Francisco