Max Planck Institute Science journal mistakenly uses flyer for Macau brothel to illustrate report on China…

The respected research institute wanted beautiful and elegant Chinese classical texts to adorn its journal, which included a special report on China. Little did they know that the text they had chosen was from a saucy flyer promoting stirppers and other features of a brothel!

To Western eyes, Chinese characters look dramatic and beautiful, and have a powerful visual impact, but be careful that you know what they say before you print or publish whatever you are using them for!

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I was looking forward to the new BBC series with Kenneth Branagh playing a detective, Wallander. The trailers seemed good, so I made sure to plonk myself in front of the TV last night at precisely 9pm. The information button said that it was about a Swedish detective, so I assumed it was set in England with Branagh playing a Swedish person living in England. Swedish people generally have fantastic American and British accents (it seems they can choose which type they study at school), so the absence of a Swedish accent from Branagh didn’t strike me as odd. I did start to get really confused when after Branagh’s character was speaking about his father, some Swedish person died (a flag and a TV programme were the clues he was Swedish), so I assumed it was his father who died. It eventually dawned on me when the “Polis” showed up, that this was another horrible example of a show set in a foreign country where everyone speaks English!
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In this country, despite our multicultural make up, we have only one Official Language for our 60 or so million inhabitants. That language is, unless you’re from Barnsley, English. The minority languages recognized on these shores are Welsh, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Lowland Scots and Cornish and rather suprisingly do not include any Asian langugaes, despite a long history of immigrants from that area.

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Every now and then a free web technology comes along that profoundly changes the way we work. Often it’s the simplest that have the most impact. Where would we be today without Skype, Blogging or Messenger?

Over the last few months I’ve been testing Live Mesh Beta. Impressed with the results, I’m ready to evangelise in a bid to encourage adoption among our suppliers, clients and others who embrace tele-working. Put simply, it saves time and improves collaboration.

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I used to volunteer at Oxfam, back in the days when I had spare time. And at Oxfam, you meet all sorts of random characters: students, OAPs, antique hunters, book collectors, people on a budget and people trying to save things from the landfill. With all of these different personalities coming together for the Great Bargain Quest, you are bound to hear some rather interesting opinions… Once, while I was ringing up a man’s purchase, he commented: “why is it that Americans and Australians are the only ones who come to the UK, but never try to speak like the British?”

It seemed to me that he thought British English was superior to my American English, and that Americans/Australians should try a bit harder to assimilate. I really didn’t know what to say to that! I think I managed some random explanation about how people who come to the UK from non-English speaking countries use British English as their model, but I was a native English speaker, so why should I try to say tom-ah-to instead of tom-ay-to?

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‘A single 30 minute lesson’ would probably be the answer to that questions from many of my collegiate peers past, but are we really, scientifically, limited by anything other than apathy?

It is true that there is a critical period for learning one’s native language as a child: feral children raised in solitude without any linguistic stimuli (or ‘negative feedback’ as it’s technically called) prove this when they are returned to society in their teens, yet remain unable to string together even a simple sentence. But what about the acquisition of a second, third, fourth or even fifth language?

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Now, the unwritten rules of this company blog (which, post-ironically, have been written down), clearly state that any self, or client slanted, promotion is punishable by death: we have a website for such things. Having said that, and at the risk of corporate punishment, two projects deserve to have at least a little digital ink spent on them…

Most summers are remembered by an effeminate pop song, the social slaughter that is Big Brother and, in this country at least, an ongoing disappointment at the crude and rainy weather. Not so for Jenn, though, Chief Project Manager here at Web-Translations, who was pinned down with the task of coordinating the translation, localisation and launch of over 2000 products and 500, 000 words into German for online camera specialists, Warehouse Express.

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UKTI has earmarked the countries that will be the next big thing in terms of International Trade.

The emerging markets in Brazil, Russia, India and China will continue to be key areas for companies trading internationally, but a report commissioned by UKTI has identified Vietnam, Mexico, Ukraine, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates as the new high-growth markets.

The “Tomorrow’s Markets” report also lists Indonesia, Poland, South Africa and Argentina among the priority markets for expansion - these countries have huge potential for investors and look set to provide companies with a similar level of success and growth that has been experienced in China and India.

So, we could soon start to see an increase in demand for Ukrainian and Vietnamese, and the other languages spoken in these emerging market countries as UK companies turn their attention there. Here’s hoping!

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Motorists in Swansea had to do a double take this week when a Welsh road sign told them: “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated”.

Unaware of the real meaning, Council officials had the Welsh text printed on the road sign under the original English, which cautions: “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only.”

The blunder happened when the council emailed its in-house team for a translation, as all road signs in Wales have to be bilingual, only to receive a Welsh reply which they failed to realise was an automated out of office notification. They only became aware of their rather embarrassing mistake when Welsh-speakers pointed it out.

The moral of this tale; always get your translations checked by a native speaker….

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This blog post is dedicated to all of the Céciles, Célines, Josés and Frédérics out there…

An easy way to make someone feel appreciated is to get their name right!  (I’m sorry, Petar, for writing “Peter” in my email last week…)  It does get a bit tricky when you are writing to Jesús or Agnès, however, as to really get their name right you need to stick in one of those funny accent marks…

The obvious way is to click the “insert symbol” function in Word or Outlook and look through all of the characters until you find the one you need, but this can sometimes take a while.  When I was at university, typing out too many French essays, I reassigned the functions of all the function keys on my laptop, so that when I hit “F2″, an “à” appeared, and “F3″ an “è”, etc.  (I don’t think it worked for F1 for some reason.)  I re-learnt to type with an extra row of keys and it really did speed up my essay-writing!

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