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Out of Office Reply Mistaken For Translation, Placed On Road Sign

by Dan Reilly on November 6, 2008 at 05:03 PM


At their jobs, some people check and recheck their work for quality and accuracy. Then there are those who fly through their assignments and send them off, assuming nothing's wrong. A city council worker in Wales clearly belongs to the latter group after mistaking the body of an "out of office" reply email for a translation that later made it onto a road sign.

The worker emailed the Swansea council's normal translation service with English text that barred commercial trucks from a residential road. The email that came back said, in Welsh, "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated." Assuming that was the requested text, the worker had that put on the official sign without proofing it. Naturally, citizens who spoke the language picked up on the error and the council removed the sign soon after.

The weirdest part is that this isn't an isolated incident. Among the notable examples, the one that stands out is a road sign that told Welsh-speaking passersby they had an "inflamed bladder." We'd like to say lesson learned, but obviously that's just not true. [From: BBC]

Tags: e-mail, humor

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