Current mood:	amused
Entry tags:	birmingham, errors, languages, translations, welsh

The dangers of machine or dictionary translation
I was meaning to comment several months ago about this, but a visit to Birmingham today jogged my memory.

The Pallisades Shopping Centre in Birmingham, which forms the roof of New Street Station, has got a number of panels wishing its' shoppers "Welcome", and "Thank you" and (by the payphones, so I suppose sponsored by a telecom company) "Hello" in many languages. My own linguistic abilities managed to check out commoner translations like "Bienvenue", "Wilkommen", "Welkom", even "Vitejte", but I barely managed to avoid bursting out laughing when I saw "Croesawu"! The languages are ordered in English alphabetical order of their name, so as it appears near the end I suppose it's supposed to be Welsh, but, oh dear, it shows all the signs of someone having used a dictionary inexpertly. Croesawu is actually the infinitive, "to welcome" - I thought everybody knew that a simple welcome is "Croeso" as on the signs you find on virtually all roads that cross the border.

At least they managed to say "thank you" properly - "diolch", but when I got round to the phones there was a panel with the only word which appears to be Welsh being "Dweud". I had to check all the other languages I know to figure out what they were trying to say - "hello", apparently. "Dweud" means "to say" or just "say", and I must confess I'm at a loss as to how they managed to get things so badly wrong. If they actually wanted to say "hello" in Welsh, what's wrong with "helo", "hylo" (depending on your accent), or informally "s'mae"?

This reminded me of a blog entry I saw some months ago. Apparently there's a combination of symbols in Chinese which means something innocuous in the retail industry, like "customer service" or something. Unfortunately, it has a subsidiary meaning, "f**k", and back in the 1990s the most popular Chinese-to-English electronic translator of the time would give this as the primary meaning, with the result that if you go shopping in China in shops with English translations of signs, you are quite likely to find the f-word!