A sign of the times
Visitors to Wales will know that the road signs are displayed in both English and Welsh, but surprisingly the English and Welsh versions don't always say the same thing, especially when the council relies on computers.
Some mistakes in translation are inevitable, although it is hard to see how Cardiff Council erected a warning sign for pedestrians in 2006 which read "Look Right" in English and "Look Left" in Welsh. Someone with even a rudimentary knowledge of Welsh would surely have spotted the problem. It was also in 2006 that a little knowledge and an English/Welsh dictionary was blamed for an error on a Wrexham school sign. The English phrase was "Staff Entrance" but whoever looked up "staff" in the dictionary forgot that "staff" has two meanings, chose the wrong one, resulting in a sign that roughly translated as "Entrance for wooden stick".
With computers, the potential for comical errors seems to increase exponentially. A computer spell checker was blamed for a mistranslation on a Swansea road sign which warned of cyclists ahead. When sending the request to the translation service, the word cyclist was mistyped but the built-in spell checker obligingly corrected the error, substituting the nearest match to the garbled letters, which happened to be "cystitis". Consequently, welsh-speaking road users were warned of "Bladder Infections Ahead".
You would think that with such well-documented blunders that the councils would have learnt the value of double-checking translations with someone who speaks welsh, but apparently not. Last month, Swansea Council needed a sign to stop lorry drivers cutting through a residential area. It decided on its English wording and sent an email to its translation service. It received a prompt reply and duly had the sign made up and erected. Bemused Welsh speakers were quick to point out that the English wording on the sign reads "No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only" whilst the Welsh version, "Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i'w gyfieithu", means "I'm not in the office at the moment. Please forward any work to be translated".
23rd November 2008
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.