I do not love this
There’s a new Dutch campaign to draw attention to following traffic rules. For reasons unknown, the ministry in question thought it useful to go Dunglish. ‘I love driving on the right’ (in the Netherlands you cannot ‘keep your lane’, you have to stay in the right lane as much as possible) is even longer than the Dutch ‘Ik hou van rechts rijden’. The printed advert uses a heart, which is fine, but the signs on the highway use the word ‘love’. ‘I love to keep right’, needs a preposition, too, and other variants are less handy than the Dutch one. Dunglish is making headway in a bad way.
September 28th, 2005 at 7:12 pm
I love Dunglish!
September 29th, 2005 at 5:58 pm
A failed (and lame) attempt by the government to sound “modern”.
It almost seems like nowadays one HAS to use some English in order to be either modern or “cool”…
It’s as if correct use of the Dutch language is “not done”… Strange development…
On the other hand… Where would this website be if the Dutch were not wreaking havoc on their own language 😛
September 30th, 2005 at 11:13 am
I absolutely enjoy running Dunglish! I still find it sad that things are getting worse and that English is cooler than Dutch to some. Maybe this trend will pass. I think that the Netherlands is worse than Flanders. Something to look into.
October 2nd, 2005 at 9:47 pm
I nearly killed myself today on the motorway in an attempt to read the electronic text display above the road saying ‘I love richtingaangeven’ (I love indicating direction’ – a variation in the same campaign). I’m not a translator, but my human factors instinct says:
1) that it is very confusing to show up trivial and funny text (I suppose that was the aim) on a display that is normally used for serious traffic information;
2) The text in itself, is hard to interpret by its Dunglishness, especially on this location. Unlike when the same text is displayed in another context, for example on a billboard using the ‘heart icon’ for ‘love’.
Shame on our minister of funny affairs!
October 5th, 2005 at 12:24 pm
A Turkish man has started a protest campaign against this compaign!
http://frontpage.fok.nl/nieuws/58312
October 31st, 2005 at 1:26 pm
A nice bit about this campaign, mentioning Dunglish:
http://www.freeke.net/columns/column_2005_10_02.htm
May 24th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
[…] Here is my original post back in September 2005: I do not love this […]