Dunglish

A fresh, new H&M clothing store that is opening soon in Haarlem is in such a rush to open they skipped the spell checker when making their new posters.

‘Victems’ should of course be ‘victims’. If you’re going to use English, you really should use it properly. But that’s too easy.

(Photo: Yuri)

While Skyping about machine translated spam into Dutch with friends, which is hilarious, I booked me a train ticket to Berlin. I have no qualms about booking plane tickets, as those e-tickets work just fine. However, knowing the poor online reputation of the Dutch railways, I wasn’t sure if I should book it online, but eventually went for it.

Besides a half-Dutch, half-English website with mistakes and title tags with the wrong prices, this confirmation e-mail landed in my inbox:

“Do not reply at this message.
This is a send-only e-mailaddress”

“At” should be “to”, a typical Dutch mistake that could have easily been checked.
“E-mailaddress” is a literal translation of “emailadres”.

They still don’t get that consumer confidence also includes proper communication. They’re just lucky they’re that much cheaper than the plane this time. I’m also waiting for a programmer to blame the CMS.

I have no idea how legit this site is or if a Dutch person is involved, but their ad makes them look quite amateurish. Maybe this was their goal!

I’m back and ready to post! It’s not really fair to call this Spanglish, a mix of English and Spanish that makes me think of East Los Angeles, but ‘Cataglish’ (Catalan and English) sounds terrible. Anyhoo, this was spotted in Barcelona, a city that I can safely say is very easy to get around in in Spanish, Catalan, English and just plain pointing at things.

But this is just funny because the Italian is apparently good and the rest goes ‘de mal en peor’ (’from bad to worse’). The French has spelling mistakes, as it should be ‘français’ (odd, since the Catalans use the ‘ç’, as in ‘Barça’, short for ‘Barcelona’). The European French as opposed to French Canadians would argue it should be ‘nous parlons français’ (’we speak French’) as opposed to the impersonal ‘on’ (’one speaks French’), which almost looked familiar to me.

And I have a theory about the ’speak English’, which is giving an order to speak English. The Spanish, and maybe the Catalans, remove the personal pronoun in front of a verb when they speak. The idea is that when reading the verb, you know who’s talking. This is true in Spanish, but not in English, while in French it’s not allowed. Hence, the commanding tone. But my theory doesn’t work with the rest, which is why I posted this mess in the first place.