Call the Reviewer!
You know that phrase, “I am out of the office at the moment” that commences auto response messages in business emails? Well, guess where it ended up? On a traffic sign in Wales! And did it cause some confusion!
It all started when someone in the traffic department in the city of Swansea (or Abertawe in Welsh) decided to send an email to the city translation department requesting the translation for a traffic sign. The sentence read “Strictly residential area. No traffic of heavy vehicles.”
The translator was on vacation and the requestor immediately received an automatic response with the phrase “I am out of the office at the moment, etc.,” except that it was written in Welsh. “How efficient!” the requestor must have thought. And as he did not know a single word in Welsh, immediately sent it for print, assuming that this should be the Welsh translation for the English traffic sign.
Translator went on holidays??!!
Then it hailed protests… Mistakes like this are common in a country where all notices and official signs have to be translated into two official languages; in this case, English and Welsh.
To show support for the Welsh speakers, the Golwg Magazine (or View, in English) has been publishing pictures of signs containing absurd or incorrect translations. And the amount of confusion and misunderstanding these signs cause is immense. According to the magazine editor, Dylan Iorwerth, these signs are created by people who completely ignore the language and do not consult with subject matter experts. In his opinion, the ideal situation would be to use two separate texts rather than translations from English to Welsh.
If you are interested in the story, take a look at the BBC News website to learn more. By the way, it is also worth re-reading a recent post in the Ccaps Blog Save the… languages? There is a reference there to the UNESCO Interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger, which classifies Welsh as a vulnerable language. The 2001 census identified 750,000 speakers, which corresponds to 20.5% of the population of the country. In England, Australia, the US and other parts of the world, you can also find speakers of this modern Celtic language spoken in the British Isles,