Provenance
- Languages
- English → Welsh
- Source
- Reported by BBC News, with a photograph of the installed sign
- Source date
- 2008-10
- Verification
- primaryRecorded from the artefact, or from a report that reproduces it.
- Mechanism
- A workflow with no translator in it; an inbox mistaken for a translation service
Input
No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only.
Mechanism
A workflow with no translator in it; an inbox mistaken for a translation service
Inference
Printed
I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.
Observed
A council in Swansea needed a bilingual sign prohibiting heavy goods vehicles from a residential road. The English side read:
No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only.
The text was emailed for translation, a reply came back, and the reply was printed on the sign and installed. The Welsh on the road said, in substance:
I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.
The mechanism is not a translation system#
There is no dictionary here, no phrase table, no model. There is an email address, an automatic reply, and a production process in which no step required anybody to read the output in the language it was written in.
This is the only specimen in the corpus whose reconstruction terminates in an office procedure, and it is the one that most reliably changes how students read the others. A great many public translation errors are not translation errors.
Why it is primary#
The sign was photographed installed, and the photograph was published with the report. The artefact and the record of the artefact are the same object, which is the strongest provenance anything in this corpus has.