Philip Norton

Take a look at this sign. It might not look like much, but the Welsh section actually reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.”.

The English is clear enough, but no one can read the Welsh bit.

What happened was that Swansea council sent the English text off to get translated into Welsh due to the legal requirement to have everything in Welsh and English. The proportion of people that speak Welsh in Swansea is very low (about 7%), but the legal requirement still stands. All Welsh councils have an in house translation service, which is always very, very busy (to which I have experience). So the Swansea council worker figured out the English and needing the translation, sent this off to the translation department. However, the worker there had put an automated reply on their email which sent back a response saying “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.”, but only in Welsh. Not understanding Welsh the council worker copied this and it was made into the sign.

The thing is, you have to wonder about how many people saw this text whilst it was being made into a sign. Supposing that this is the fault of the transport department I figure that these are the steps involved.

• Transport worker creates text and sends it off to get translated into Welsh. This would be just a single person entering the English text.
• The “translation” is sent back (as far as this worker is concerned).
• The Transport worker sends this onto the people making the sign. This would involve another person from the sign makers looking at the text.
• The people making the sign take this text and run it through their manufacturing process. This would include the design, printing and creation of the sign. Assuming that Swansea council do all this in house there would still be 10-20 people about who would have read the text or the sign at some point.
• The sign gets sent back to the Transport office. This would probably get quality checked by the Transport office, so another couple of people would see it.
• Workers at the Transport office arrange to get the sign placed on the street.
• The sign is taken to the designated position by a road works lorry and put in place. This might involve 2-3 guys who would have to dig the whole, put the poles in and put up the sign.

So just in making a sign there would probably be at least 30 people who would have seen this sign and read the text. At no point in this process did anyone say “this doesn’t say what you think it says” because none of them could speak a word of Welsh.

I wonder what the was point of translating it in the first place?