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!?