What’s the most horrific bit of grammar mangling you’ve seen in a Mobile product?
By Ben Robinson on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 4:09 PM PST In Ideas and rants
Mobile tech is wonderful in many respects – the pace of innovation, the ability to make desirable products from seemingly abstract concepts, and a genuine desire I think, to connect the world wirelessly. But sometimes, the word gremlins get in to products and their user guides, and bad things happen.
I guess in a lot of respects language can have something to do with it – when you sell a product across numerous regions, with lots of regional and national variations of languages, the person(s) doing the translating have to be aware of all the nuances to ensure phrases, instructions, and info text is translated correctly.
By enlarge, most companies are pretty good at this – and they large fees to translation companies to ensure this is so – but every so often, one little fish slips through the net….
Take this example from a handset manufacturer – when the handset browser was fired up, and a page was navigated to, you would often get a pop-up box on screen whilst the page was loading, that said:
Layouting…
What a fabulous piece of grammar mangling! To most people, that phrase is gibberish, but in a strange way, understandable at the same time – the point being that the browser is “laying out” or “rendering” the page.
However, I’m SURE I can’t be alone in experiencing the comedy of errors that sometimes occurs in things such as product info, user guides, or maybe in the handset itself – so let us know, what you have you seen that either made you laugh, shudder, or in fact, just made you angry!?
That should be “by and large” … no, not remotely ironic
Anchorage is a city in Alaska, USA. The word means an area that is suitable for a ship to anchor. Naturally, when you translate the Samsung UI to Finnish, you do not write the name of the city (”Anchorage”, as you see in Finnish maps), but the Finnish translation “to anchor”. This is in my daughter’s Samsung phone.
Finnish translation of the UIQ calendar entry UI is quite funny too. The calendar entry contains a place where you can write the chair(man) of the meeting (email address). The chair of the meeting translated into Finnish tells that you really are a chair (the furniture object; tuoli in Finnish). In Finnish you would say spokesman (as translated to English).
I know this isn’t really at all related to the subject becasue it has nothing to do with mobile devices but I have noticed around alot of places that people are replacing the word “please” with “plox or pl0x” What is that?! It jsut drives me insane to see that being typed!
I’ve giving a few people hell for it, lol.