Monday 31 May 2010

Someone really ought to have checked their job description more carefully

Can you speak Welsh?



This road sign is in Wales. You might expect that bottom bit to be Welsh for " If you are driving a big lorry carrying stuff, you can't come in.  People live here, you know".  That's certainly what the Swansea Council officials were hoping for when they were having the sign made and sent an e-mail to their in-house translation service to ask for some Welsh words to put on it.

It's not what the bottom half of the sign says. What the sign actually says, in Welsh,  is "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated".

People blamed the council for not checking the translation properly before going ahead and having the sign made.  But what I want to know is, if your job is to translate things into Welsh, how much of an idiot do you have to be to write your out-of-office reply in Welsh, which is the one language that you can guarantee every single person seeking your services will not understand?

No one seems to have questioned this.  For the record, I'm all for preserving the Welsh language, but really, it strikes me as kind of stupid.

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