BBC Words in the News 13/9 with transcript video

Andy Murray will collect £1.6m in prize money for yesterday’s victory, but that’s a modest sum compared with the amount he could earn now his status as a national sporting hero has been sealed.

According to his manager, Simon Fuller, Murray’s victory is no less a triumph than winning the top prize in football. And he’s now admired not just as a sportsman but as a personality.

Andy Murray’s manager, Simon Fuller:

The public has warmed to Andy. As each year passes they understand him and they warm to him, and I think people got a little insight as to how big a heart he has and how sort of passionate he is about sport and what a truly great guy, and I think that, combined with winning on court, makes for a true superstar.

Murray’s already earning £15m over five years from sportswear sponsorship and he was reckoned to be worth a total of £32m even before yesterday’s victory.

If he now exploits ‘brand Murray’ to the full, marketing experts believe, he could earn £15m a year making him one of the highest-earning sportsmen in the world.

Many of the major players in the political turmoil that’s engulfed Egypt in recent days have large followings on Twitter. But for the most part, unsurprisingly, they post their messages in Arabic.

Now Twitter has launched a service that aims to spread their words to a wider international audience. It’s using a translation tool provided through Microsoft’s Bing search engine to convert Arabic messages into other languages. This meant, for example, that non-Egyptians had instant access to messages put on Twitter by former president Mohammed Morsi as he was ousted from power by the army.

Non-Egyptians can also follow the Twitter musings of other significant players such as Mohammed ElBaradei, the ex-UN atomic energy agency chief.

But Twitter admits its translations are not always 100% accurate. For example, the English version of the last tweet posted by former President Morsi ended with a word starting with the letters d-a-k-h-l-i-h-o-a, which neither made any sense nor appeared in any dictionary. Twitter describes its translation service as an “experiment“.