Welsh Translation Fail

This article was inspired by none other than my old friend, Nigel Stapley.

I have to report that my reporting of Welsh translation failures is not yet complete. I have one further incident to report ... and this one, to my surprise and mild embarrassment, hails from my neck of the woods. Specifically, from my old school, St Joseph's:-

School's Welsh sign angers public A new shared-faith school in Wrexham has had to remove a sign after it was wrongly translated into Welsh. The sign that in English read "Pupils' and staff entrance" at St Joseph's Catholic and Anglican School was rendered into near-gibberish in Welsh. It included a word for staff meaning "wooden stave" rather than workers. Wrexham council said the final responsibility for translation lay with the churches but admitted future signs should be overseen by the council. The sign read "Ddisgybl a Baladr daflu i Berlewyg" ["throw student and wooden stick into a trance"] but a better translation would have been "Mynedfa ar gyfer Staff a Disgyblion" ["Entrance for Students and Staff"]. Click on the pic above for more ...

"People called Roman, they go the 'ouse?"

Despite years of work on the software, human language translation still beats machine translation - and it never pays to have just one Welsh speaker on the staff, in case he or she falls ill or is otherwise unavailable just when they're needed the most.

Hint, hint.

As they say on the other side of the world:-


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