A Laff a Minet (A laugh a Minute)

Submitted by Pied Piper (Saudi Arabia), Oct 1, 2014 at 09:38

IBX better avail itself of another translation service because there are all kinds of errors in its "Multi-language interpreter services" publication.

1. As Dr. Pipes points out, English is not a foreign language in the USA. Therefore, there should be no section in English in this specific publication.

2. Note that all the languages in bold lettering at the beginning of each language section are in English. They should be in the specific language described. (Presumably, a Chinese speaker, for example, would not know how to read "CHINESE" as written in English – he'd have to see it in Chinese script to know this is the Chinese section). Only one language gets this correct…..Portuguese….it's even written with the correct accent mark. All the other languages should follow this practice. (Why would only Portuguese be written correctly and every other language incorrectly?)

3. I have to correct Dr. Pipes with regard his remark that since IBX allots a paragraph each to Chinese dialects Mandarin and Cantonese, the same should hold true for Arabic, since Arabic has at least 5 major dialect groups. The difference, of course, is that Arabic uses only 1 written form for all the dialects (the so-called Modern Standard Arabic) so all literate Arabic speakers WRITE in the same standard language regardless of their spoken dialect. The same is not true for Chinese Mandarin and Cantonese.

However, the Arabic section does indeed have a major error. THE TELEPHONE NUMBER IS WRITTEN BACKWARDS !! Even though Arabic is written and read from right to left (unlike English) the numbers are written and read like English….from left to right. This is the most glaring error of the entire publication and shows the editors of this publication are waaaaay in over their heads in this little project.

(Also, both Chinese and Arabic have their own characters for the numbers……why are they using English (European) numbers?

What else? O yeah, a couple of more bloopers I saw just in passing:

4. HINDI has its own section, but what about URDU? Each language has approximately the same number of speakers in the USA and although the 2 languages are almost the same, they use completely unrelated alphabets. Hindi uses the so-called Devengari script (as found in this pamphlet) while Urdu uses a modified Persian/Arabic script. By just using the Hindi script, IBX in effect, fails to provide this service to nearly ½ of Hindi-Urdu speakers in the USA.

5. I suppose one can "forgive" errors in these "weird" languages, but what about in such a common language as Italian (Eye-Talian)? We find an error here too: in the third line you find the word: "…..Italianovi….". It should be 2 words, not one: "…..italiano vi….."

6. Many of the languages do not capitalize languages. German, for one. Yet all of these languages that have capitals show the language name capitalized. It's "deutsch", not "Deutsch"…….and so on.

FINAL GRADE: F

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