Correction of mistakes, that is how we decided to entitle our materials dedicated to various mistakes we meet in periodicals, advertisements, and signs. Here we invite you, our readers, to send us the photos of absurdities you notice at the city street signs, newspaper pages, magazines, and websites. We apologize for the mistakes we make in our articles. Let us keep eyes open!
Today we showcase the results of KFU press centre's first photo hunting (held with the participation of the founder of a social network group) commented by experts.
Why is it so funny and so sad?
Expert: Anna Karimova, Cand.Sc. (Education), associated professor of the Department of Contrastive Linguistics and Lingvodidactics of the KFU Institute of Philology and Intercultural Communications.
"There is a kind of magic in the names of streets, shops, and ads. How else can we explain all those numerous mistakes in their translation into English? As if by magic, marina becomes "landing place". Government contractors do probably have their own ideas of ships "landing".
The word "CENTR" at the same sign is no less interesting. It may well be that the authors could not choose which way of information transmission to use - transliteration, transcription, or translation, that led to mixing all those means.
The authors of the following sign should probably have problems with spelling. However, the word "welcome" has become ingrained in our speech so that it is often written according to Russian spelling rules rather than English orthography. The phonetic approach to writing the word "online" reveals experts of English pronunciation, with spelling problems, unfortunately.
The authors of the next sign take the cake. The have made a short cut; they translated every single word separately and then put them all together in a sentence. We can guess that such an intended blatant disregard of word polysemy and synonyms search was caused by strict deadline and lack of a good dictionary.
It's worth mentioning that however English has become an integral part of our everyday life, we hear and meet it everywhere, living in the language fluency illusion, and it does not mean real knowledge. People use sloppy English, because they do not think about what they say and write.
Mistakes are a part of our life, they sometimes make language experts wonder and feel sad, excellent pupils laugh, the authorities feel annoyed by being shown their negligence. The best way out here is the compulsory control of what we have in our streets, a kind of philological patrol. To our mind, the main reason of such mistakes in adverts, signs and titles is the incompetence and cost cutout, as a professional translator is a costly affair.