Saturday, November 01, 2008

Welsh road sign mix up

As reported on the BBC yesterday, and the Gruniad today, council workers need a Welsh translation of an English sign, so emailed the English version to their interpreter for translation. What they got back was an email in Welsh, which they promptly used for the Welsh part of the sign.



The problem being, what they got back was "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated."

This displays such an odd attitude from all concerned, why was it blindly assumed this email ONLY in Welsh said what it was supposed to? certainly when we received work translated into another language we got the relevant English with the other language alongside (or below) for comparison, along with an English note from the interpreter, usually a thank you or general "compliments slip" type acknowledgment.

So do English speaking council staff expect such incivility from Welsh translators as routine? And also why was the "out of office" notice not in both Welsh and English?

Sounds like bloody mindedness on both sides to me.

Welsh sign mix up, full story.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"And also why was the 'out of office' notice not in both Welsh and English?"

I suspect it was, but that the e-mail wasn't read in full.

Assuming that they believed that the autoreply was correctly translated, they've still left half of it off the sign. The Welsh sentence as it appears on the sign is incomplete.

It would therefore seem that the signmakers didn't bother reading past the first two lines of the e-mail, and that they displayed a rather cavalier approach to the quality control of the Welsh part of the sign.