When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.
Unfortunately, the e-mail response to Swansea council said in Welsh: "I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated".
So that was what went up under the English version which barred lorries from a road near a supermarket.
Picture of the sign at the link.
Here in the Twin Cities, we have substantial communities of Hmong and Somali as well as a large and growing number of Spanish speakers, and it isn't uncommon to see signs written in one or two or even all of these languages as well as English -- not many road signs or other government signs that I know of, except in St. Paul where signs in Hmong are surprisingly common, but local businesses hoping to attract everybody will put them up, and you will sometimes see them in medical clinic waiting rooms. I know some people are bothered by the very idea of such things, but I like to read them, practicing my rudimentary Spanish skills and trying to find the linguistic patterns in the other languages.
(And then there's the sort of thing that shows up in Desperate's tonier-than-mine neighborhood.)
Not counting the last one, I wonder how well these signs are translated.
The mistranslated-Welsh-sign meme seems to be a recurring one in Britain. Perhaps Welsh government rules that signs must be bilingual (which is a very different thing from signs that local businesses put up freely) have an air of ridiculousness to them?
Comments