One of Britain’s top retailers has been accused of making a mockery of the Welsh language at its self-service payment tills.
Welsh-speaking visitors to WH Smith’s Cardiff city centre store were astonished by the way questions to customers buying goods had been drafted.
They posted details on the website of the free language learning website SaySomethingInWelsh.com
Translated back into English, the three steps for purchasers would read:
Make ‘ou need towards buying any gwith ‘n exaltation items?
Broughtest you plastic bags? Thouch yes and bag accuse gwith £0.01 will be ajouter to ‘ou total
Pleasing thake ‘ou ‘n above offer voucher gwith ‘r highly above holder.
A contributor to the website wrote: “Has anyone else tried the new self-service tills in WH Smith yet?
“I chose the Welsh option (hidden under the ‘languages’ button), and it was all going swimmingly until I went to pay for my items. How was I supposed to answer Yes or No to questions like these?”
Aran Jones, the joint owner of the website, said: “This really is the high water mark in what has been a series of blunders by organisations who oddly take the view that they can provide a Welsh language service without taking the trouble to talk to someone who can speak Welsh.
“It’s obvious that these ridiculous formulations are the result of putting questions in English through an automatic website translator. The underlying point here is that it shows the blank stupidity of a corporate decision made by people who think so little about the Welsh language that they can’t take the trouble to get it right.” Read more.
See: Wales Online
Comments about this article
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:54
Italian to English
+ ...
What English speaker will know what "mushrooms in humid" are at a restaurant?
And with so much tourism about, it would be so so simple to ask a quick favour of a native English speaker for example, or a native Welsh s... See more
What English speaker will know what "mushrooms in humid" are at a restaurant?
And with so much tourism about, it would be so so simple to ask a quick favour of a native English speaker for example, or a native Welsh speaker in this case, just to proofread the menu/self-service tills/advertising posters/even airport signs before thousands of euros are spent on making them and installing them.
I just don't understand why they don't ask!!! ▲ Collapse
Spain
Local time: 11:54
Member (2005)
English to Spanish
+ ...
To me, it looks like they hired one of those "world-class translation agency with 2,000 top-notch freelance translators". They should have hired a small Welsh firm who would have made this a success, but big companies just don't know how to deal with small, specialised offices, being the opposite also true.
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:54
German to English
Perhaps they thought it unlikely that any monolingual Welsh speakers would be visiting their store. I suspect they were right.
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