The Ayuntamiento de Jerez gets EU money to assist with tourist promotion, but professional translators won’t work with it because it never pays on time. So instead of employing someone who can speak English and knows how to use a spellcheck, translation jobs seem to go to some witless illiterate at town hall who may,…
The chief of police of this small tourist town has apparently published an English version of the municipal bylaws. Among other things he wants you to do is to “Alter public order and tranquillity with scandals, disturbances, brawls and noise.” Will fucked translation constitute an adequate defence for British hooligans? Is the council–whose income from…
MM points out that “Our Mrs of” is a popular variant on the web (289 ghits), although still not quite as popular as “Our Lady of” (7,360,000 ghits). “Our mistress of” doesn’t sound quite as strange to native readers of dismal Tolkien epigonism, but let’s use the net to promote “Our Mrs of”, “Jesus Christ…
The most heartbreaking experience I’ve had recently was watching a smallholder digging up the vines he planted during the 60s and 70s boom. Brussels used to pay him subsidies to plant, but now they’ve said that he’ll only be able to earn money by destroying what they regard as his means of production but which…
More poorly translated save-the-planet spam: Ingles:Darkness world: On September 17, 2008 from 21:50 to 22:00 hours.Proposes to delete all lights and if possible all electrical appliances, to our planet can ‘breathe’.if the answer is massive, energy saving can be brutal.Only 10 minutes, and see what happens.Yes, we are 10 minutes in the dark, we light…
The organisation that pimped Aznar to Deloitte can’t afford a translator: There is only one person capable of combining intellectual stature, communication abilities, and bullfighting mastership: Luis Francisco Esplá. Highly recommended for international meetings and foreign notorious visits, he is the sole bullfighter able to make the audience vibrate in a convention or congress. As…
Bodegas Almocaden goes beyond the usual annoying Flash and cursor-stalker. All a bit sad: I’ve never drunk anything by them, but I suspect it’s pretty good. Unfortunately there’s more to life than product.
I think they mean tourist guides. (The link doesn’t take you to the English version, unfortunately, so you’ll have to look for it yourself. Globally speaking, Turisme de Vic’s has got to be one of the worst-built sites out there.)
Many thanks to Lenox Napier, who says this has been inflicted on businesses in Almería since at least the 1970s, and who notes the loving care with which fonts were matched when phone numbers changed from 6 to 9 digits.