Worst Sign Fails: Lost in Translation

A mistranslated sign is a small permanent monument to a moment when everybody in the room assumed somebody else had checked. Somewhere there was a budget, a fabricator, a van and a man with a drill. Every one of them did their job. The words were the only part nobody owned. Let’s kick things off in Wales, which has produced the finest example the world has yet managed.

The Sign That Was an Out of Office Reply

In 2008, Swansea council needed a bilingual sign banning heavy goods vehicles from a residential road. The English text was written, the Welsh was requested by email from the in-house translation service, and a reply came back. The reply was pasted onto the artwork, printed, and erected next to a supermarket.

The Welsh read: “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.” It stood there for some time. Welsh speakers driving past assumed at first that they were misreading it, because the alternative was too good to be true. Somebody photographed it. The BBC picked it up. The council took it down and, to its credit, admitted exactly what had happened rather than inventing a technical fault.

Why it’s weird: the sign is honest. It is a truthful statement about the availability of a translator, rendered in vinyl at public expense, mounted at eye level on a public road. It just answers a question nobody driving a lorry was asking.

Translate Server Error, the Restaurant

A Chinese restaurant sign that went round the world in 2008 carried Chinese characters and, underneath them, the English name of the establishment: Translate Server Error. Somebody had run the name through an online tool, the tool had fallen over, and the error message came back where the English was meant to be. That message went to the signwriter, the signwriter did as instructed, and a restaurant opened under the name of a software fault.

We have thought about this one for years. The chain of trust required is beautiful. Every person in it behaved reasonably. The output was a shopfront that reads like a stack trace.

The Cardiff Cycling Advisory

Wales again, because a bilingual requirement means every sign gets a second chance to go wrong. A sign in Cardiff intended to tell cyclists to dismount instead carried Welsh wording that a fluent reader took as something closer to bladder disease having collapsed. The English half was fine. Monolingual English readers passed it daily without noticing anything. Welsh speakers had a considerably more interesting commute.

The Category Nobody Can Fix

The specific cases are funny. The general problem is structural, and it explains why these keep appearing.

Machine translation now fails politely. It does not produce gibberish any more. It produces a confident sentence in the target language that means something adjacent to the thing you wanted. A sign saying “Careful, slippery” comes back as an instruction about carefulness in general, or a philosophical observation about surfaces. Nobody at the fabrication stage reads the target language, so nobody catches it. The old failures announced themselves. The new ones look completely fine until a native speaker walks past and stops dead.

The Ones That Are Doing It On Purpose

A caution. Not every strange English sign abroad is an accident. Tourist areas in several countries have worked out that a slightly wrong sign gets photographed, posted and shared, and that a photographed sign is free advertising. Some of the wonkier menus you have seen have been focus-grouped. We are not going to name the offenders, partly because we cannot prove it, and partly because a deliberately bad sign is still a bad sign and we take our pleasures where we find them.

How to Not Do This

Practical advice, at no charge, for anyone commissioning bilingual signage. Get the translation from a person. Send that person a photograph of where the sign is going and what it needs to stop people doing, because “no entry” translates one way for a door and another way for a road. Then, before the vinyl is cut, show the finished artwork to a second speaker who was not involved. Total cost: one coffee. Total saving: your council appearing on the national news attached to the phrase “send any work to be translated” for the rest of recorded history.

Our position, unchanged since 2015: if you cannot read your own sign, you have not finished making it.