Io no spic Inglish
Wednesday, 25 July 2007
Every day I interact with people for whom English is not their mother tongue. I am a Director of a non-profit foundation which has a Board of seven directors, speaking four different languages. I am also a member of a team of thirty people from 16 different countries, all working together on developing software. A number of the team use translation tools to facilitate communication in English while others of us have gained skills in reading other languages.
This causes a great deal of hilarity at times but also tends to make me very aware of English expressions that can cause difficulty. Every now and then I read something that makes me wonder how my team mates would interpret the sentence. Consider this introductory paragraph in a current NZPA release:
A police dog is receiving medical treatment after it was stabbed several times near Rotorua.
Stuff
If you have time to waste, consider copying those words into an automatic translation tool (Google languages will do the trick) and translate it to another language, then back to English. Pretend you don’t know that Rotorua is a city. The poor dog was stabbed several times in a very strange part of it’s body!
