I’ve been waiting for just the right moment to blog this one for a couple of months now. I think in keeping with my earlier post about the Out-Of-Office notice, that we should be reminded that it isn’t just the English and the Welsh that don’t always get their translations sorted out.
This photo, from Michael Turton in Taiwan, contains a real hoot of an English… sentence?
You be the judge.
It reads: “Happy flavor tibet in mine secret garden brocade box.”
From the BBC
Have you ever sent an e-mail to someone about something important and you get a reply almost immediately from them and you think, “Good, I can get this issue taken care of right away?”
Here’s an example of the how that can go wrong. The sign above is in English and Welsh. The Swansea council asked, by e-mail, for the English to be translated into Welsh.
Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated”.
The BBC article goes on to talk about a few other (somewhat less) embarrassing mistranslations into Welsh.