Broken Aranglish, originally uploaded by malyousif.
Broken Arabic AND English at the same time at the Honda dealership in Bahrain (National Motor Co.) in Sitra.
You would think that if a company spends literally millions of dinars on their facility, can’t they spend just a few dinars to get a proper copywriter, or at least get a native speaker to check the grammar in passing?
I shudder to think at the amount of detail they actually adopt in servicing their cars!
Comments
Funny you mention this: here in Japan, I get a kick out of all the creative ways English is used. Check this out for a good laugh.
Sounds like a Google translation
You *really* should submit that to engrish.com. They often have “engrish” from other countries, not just Japan. What would the Arabic translate to in English?
I bet my new screen that it’s a word to word translation of AlWafi, seen a lot of those around the office
When people stop noticing and caring, why would Honda bother the least about broken Arabic/English? I’ve read a post once somewhere that was asking bloggers to dumb down, their language was too difficult. Yes, bloggers language is too complicated apparently, not Dickens or Shakespeare, but bloggers.
I love it when this happens. With all the native English speakers, and indeed all the competent English-second-language speakers, here in this part of the world, its a mystery to me why this keeps happening. Its tempting to start some sort of home business inviting people to e-mail me their proposed signage for editing! I’m sure I would make money. I’m with Barry, send it to http://www.engrish.com. Its a great website for those who haven’t seen it. This is just their sort of thing!
In England, they speak English.
In Singapore, they speak Singlish.
In Pakistan, they speak Pinglish.
In Bahrain, we speak Binglish.
:biggrin:
Ha hahahahahahahaha now that is the result of hiring…..you know (foriegners) our shall we say lo paid foriegners lol that is so funney……….
priceless lol hehehehehe can’t they afford hiring a Bahraini like my self and giving him a car instead of the Bahraini trying to find a job in OTHER COUNTRIES…..
OMG, I can’t believe this .. I couldn’t get anything from both the Arabic and English sentences.
This does not make any sense.
Neither does this.
Neither an Arabic-speaker nor an English-speaker would understand anything from this, because both of them are not making any sense.
Did you not point that out to the guys in the reception, Mahmood?
If you notice there is a guy in the chair inside that room, with his back to us. He knew what we were going on about as he just turned, smiled and turned back to his phone!
Yes, I guess they do know about it. The sign isn’t new either. It’s been there for a while.
1. moodz, even if this is a translation of AlWafi, it’s written wrong in both languages, i.e. they began with a wrong text in the first place.
2. Such broken Arabic and English plus spelling mistakes are very common nowadays even in official government forms. It’s very annoying.
3. I noticed recently an increase of funny mistakes in Arabic subtitles of English speaking shows. Moreover, I noticed that Egyptian and Lebanese translators don’t recognize the difference between fluent Arabic and their dialects, for example: they pronounce “th” (as in the) as z, so if a translator wants to show his skills in Arabic he would replace all z’s with “th” even in words where z is the correct pronunciation.