Lost in Translation

A cute story, and true, is told of a road sign in Swansea, Wales.

As you know, Wales is an officially bilingual country, and signage must be shown in both Welsh and English. A fine ideal, but sometimes the best-laid plans go wrong in the hands of the careless.

As it happened, the city council needed to erect a sign saying, in English, “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only.” As one would do in Canada, a request for translation was sent off by email to the official translator, and before long, a response was in hand. The message on the translation was sent off to the sign shop, and soon enough, an imposing notice was erected at the entrance to the site, in English and in Welsh. The Welsh signage was “Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i’w gyfieithu,” making the sign fully and compliantly bilingual.

It wasn’t long before the phone began to ring. Some calls were lighthearted, some were indignant, but all pointed out that the Welsh language portion of the sign said, “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”

The sign people had done what most of us might have done; that is, they copied the email response and printed it. The only problem was that they had no idea what it meant.

Now, it’s fine for us to laugh at the foibles of the Swansea City sign department, but don’t you and I do that kind of thing pretty regularly? I know I’m happy to share opinions about subject matter of which I have only scant knowledge, and I make buying decisions after I have researched only enough to justify what I really want to do, anyway.

The sign guys could easily enough have run the English sentences through an online translator to have received a rough and ready Welsh output, which would have instantly shown that something was amiss. Really astute bureaucrats would then have run the Welsh through Google Translate to find out what they were about to immortalize. This is just a variation of the old adage, “Measure twice, cut once. Measure once, cut twice.”

Again, the virtue of double-checking our output, particularly getting a second set of eyes on our work, can’t be overstated.

Which is why I ordinarily review these Briefings and Notes eight or ten times, and even then… misteaks are maed.