If you thought only the Chinese and other Asians translated English literally into unreadable Manglish, from risible warnings—“Do not iron with the clothes on”—to infuriatingly incomprehensible instructions for using a camera, think again. The French, who should know better, do it too.
The publicity brochure for the train ride I take today reads:
Le Train Touristique des Gorges de l’Allier: voyage sur la mythique ligne des Cevennes, au cœur de gorges sauvages et spectaculaires.
Perfectly good French, to be sure. A sensible translation might read:
The Gorges of the Allier Tourist Train: travel the legendary Cevennes line in the heart of wild spectacular gorges.
Instead we have this stitled literal account:
The Touristic Train of the Gorges of the Allier: voyage on the mythic line of the Cevennes in the heart of gorges wild and spectacular.
It gets it wrong right from the off: touristic is not an English word according to my library of English dictionaries.
The extended guide for travellers on the train gets no better. One village is described as “entirely restored, reconverted in a broke up hotel”. The Allier is “a river of Canadian type, with plane zones followed by zones on stronger activity”. (What could be stronger than an A380 Airbus putting down in a precipitous gorge?)
There’s bad spelling—emmergency, allowes—and plenty of sentence fragments—no verbs, and sometimes no subjects.
Asians can probably be forgiven for their execrable English; after all, they live a million miles from its origin on the other side of the planet. The French, however, live next to the source; indeed, they are the source of some 65 per cent of English words.
A good translator could fix this shit in five minutes. Perhaps it’s just that mythic Gallic arrogance: they’d rather wave a fist at English than make a better fist of it. They’re farting in our general English direction.
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