A clear idea
“Ikea, the international poster child of uniformity, might be expected
to have some problems with a marginal language like Dutch, but should
be eminently capable of producing decent English, you’d think.”
This document was written by someone in the Dutch office. Maybe the Brit was on vacation, maybe the boss got the Dutch secretary to do it, maybe they couldn’t be bothered to copy what Ikea stores in other countries use. Why is it in English, I wonder.
“As a result, while waiting for a delivery this morning I couldn’t help
but congratulate myself for “preventing myself from paying the
delivery costs twice”. I was similarly reassured to learn that “it
should be possible to carry in the products in a normal way”, while
blissfully “thinking about (…) little cabinets”.
Enjoy your Billy bookcases!
(Photo: Cornelis)
October 20th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
“Unfortunately we do not accept liability for any damage to the above mentioned objects.”
1. I’ll make sure to leave my rollerblades lying around somewhere along the path and blame
IKEA for damaging those and for ruining all the freshly delivered IKEA stuff in the process ;-P
2. Unfortunately? If they think, their non-liability clause is unfortunate”, then please
let IKEA withdraw that non-liability clause for their list of delivery conditions 😀
Ah well, let’s not turn this into an IKEA rant…
October 20th, 2006 at 12:35 pm
I wrote: ” for their list of delivery conditions ”
I meant: ” from their list”, of course… (Moderator, please moderate :-P)
October 23rd, 2006 at 3:52 pm
This document was written by someone in the Dutch office
You know this for sure?
IKEA is guilty of producing a fair bit of Swenglish too – referring to employees as ‘co-workers’ (medarbetare) is one of the more obvious examples.
I have some IKEA Christmas lights whose instructions hector the user about safety in an odd frumpy Swedo-British tone: ‘Have you got small children in the house? Have you a smoke alarm?’, etc.
October 23rd, 2006 at 3:57 pm
I know nothing for sure; you could be right 🙂 I remember the first French translations in Canada – scary…!
October 29th, 2006 at 10:36 am
“it should be possible to carry in the products in a normal wayâ€
Have they seen Dutch stairs or by normal way do they mean winching it up outside the window?