E-mail error ends up on road sign

[epi0Bauqu]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/7702913.stm

[jcl]

"It's good to see people trying to translate, but they should really ask for expert help."

The sad thing is: they did ask for expert help, and this is what it got them.

[cstejerean → jcl]

That's what happens when you ask for things you don't understand and you trust the answer from just one person.

[notauser → cstejerean]

If I wrote my out of office message in Lisp I'm not sure I would be able to blame someone else for any resulting screw ups.

[jodrellblank → cstejerean]

Not one person, the council's own in-house translation service. (OK, that could be one person, but the implication is that it is not).

This is what happens when you don't have any sort of defined procedures, reviews, approval process, QA or sanity checks, or if you just ignore them.

[mhartl]

No idea if the translation here is right, but it's sufficient for a sanity check:

http://www.tranexp.com:2000/InterTran?url=http%3A%2F%2F&...

[palish → mhartl]

I prefer sanity checking the translator by reverse-translating his output:

Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i'w gyfieithu.

Bit I am being crookedly the office at this time. You send any time I w translate.

That would give me pause before I painted it onto my street sign.

[mhartl → palish]

That's an even better idea.

[dougp]

If they used xml this wouldn't have happened

[rokhayakebe]

Although it is a bit different, this shows you should proofread your email before you hit SEND.

[silentbicycle → rokhayakebe]

This is irrelevant - it was an email auto-responder.

Maybe a better observation is that if you're the only person in a company that can read/write a language, don't write your auto-respond message in it.

[hugh → silentbicycle]

I'm guessing that the auto-respond was written in both languages, but somebody forgot to read the English bit and just copied down the bit that looked Welsh.

Of course, if these people were rational they might take a step back at this point and say "If Welsh-speaking skills are so rare here in Wales that this kind of thing can happen, why are we bothering to translate everything into Welsh?"

[silentbicycle → hugh]

I think it's because they're politically pressured to; there are cultural groups trying to keep the Welsh language from dying out. (I don't know Welsh or live in the UK, though, so I'm going to defer to anybody who knows better.)