Wag your tale
Happy New Year to you all!
It’s been a while, but I’m back.
The site of the city of Wageningen is written in whatever English. They surely have the money and time to do it right, but obviously don’t care. Does it matter? Well, it’s a crappy way to promote your city if you care this little about communicating properly.
One particularly sloppy section:
“First registrion:
If you are planning to stay in Wageningen for more than four month, you have to register at te population register of de manicipality in Wageningen.”
(Thanks, Robin!)
Tags: Wageningen
January 12th, 2010 at 6:45 am
If you back-translate using Google Translate, you get more or less an intelligible and sometimes quite gramatically correct Dutch. So they must have used machine translation and have the result edited by someone who had no clue about correct English language (manicipality? what about womanicipality? LOL)
January 14th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
This from a city whose university draws English-speaking (or at least non-Dutch-speaking) students from all over!
Appalling. I’ve sent them an e-mail (something I don’t usually do anymore, because fighting the cheapskate ‘but I learned English at school’ mentality is largely futile).
January 30th, 2010 at 6:26 am
I just can’t believe any electronic translation machine would come up with the non-existing word “registrion”. This to me looks more like the work of a sloppy typist.