Thursday 4 January 2007

Tin I help you?

I am still laughing at this example of machine translation from English to Italian, which turns "Can anyone suggest..." into something like "tin can suggests someone"!

My current reading pile includes "Lost in Translation: Misadventures in English Abroad", by Charlie Croker, which is a lovely collection of mistranslations, typos and punctuation errors. Given my internet name(s) I qannot but quote this chapter title from a book about the history of Garuda, the Indonesian Airline: "Total Quality Qontrol"!

But the one I like most so far is a sign at Heathrow Airport which apparently reads "No electric people carrying vehicles past this point" - what a difference a hyphen makes!

1 Comments:

At 5/1/07 14:25, Blogger Sabine said...

I love that book by Charlie Croker. A photocopied excerpt was handed out to guests at the London hotel where I was staying last November. I read it during breakfast and almost choked on my food... LOL!

 

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