5 thoughts on “Ah Anseo”

  1. f_lawless

    I’ve always said that the Irish language revival movement needs to change the path it’s been going down but they wouldn’t listen and now look .

  4. John Smith

    Ireland isn’t alone in this. Wales has had many similar happenings, no doubt for similar reasons. There are several examples on the Net, like this one:

    Guardian 1 Nov 2008: Swansea council contacted its in-house translation service when designing the bilingual sign. The seeds of confusion were sown when officials received an automated email response in Welsh from an absent translator.

    The sign gave the English version ‘No entry for heavy goods vehicles’, along with the message from the email which was, in Welsh, “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.” The man who had the sign made was given a replica of the sign at his retirement do.

    It would have been helpful if the translator had recognised that people sending him messages about translations probably wouldn’t understand a holiday message in Welsh! A bilingual message would have prevented this problem.

    I’m a great supporter of keeping alive Irish and Welsh and, mistakes in translation aside, I like the dual-language signs, especially as the Irish ones use two different scripts. (I wish the Welsh dual-language ones did something similar). However, I am very unhappy with the single Irish-language warning and place-name signs in Gaeltacht areas. These, especially the former, are dangerous, as they cannot be understood by many Irish residents.

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