Week 7: Signage and the state

This week

Bench

14 April 2027 Read the standard against the sign reading one against the other

Slides

Open the deck

Specimens

I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.

The Swansea road sign primary

Due

The reconstruction 16 April 2027

Some errors are not made by translators. They are made by procurement.

China’s national guidance on English in public service areas prescribes the wording of thousands of individual signs, which turns a translation question into a compliance question and moves the error from the translator to whoever did or did not read the clause.

Then there is the Welsh road sign a Swansea council put up in 2008, where the English was emailed to a translator and the Welsh that came back — and went onto the sign, and onto the road — was an out-of-office auto-reply. No translation system was involved. The mechanism was an inbox.

Outline#

• standardised signage: what a clause can specify, and what it cannot
• who is obliged, who produces, and what sits between them
• the Swansea sign, read as a workflow rather than as a translation
• why the funniest artefact in the course has no translator in it