With a friend, I visited Wales back in the '80s. I have two great memories of that trip. The first is of the beach at Tenby, which was at the base of an incredibly high, rocky hill, and at which the water was unbelieveably cold. The second memory was of the family we stayed with. They were my friend's boyfriend's grandparents, and they were natives of Wales, and hence English was not their first language. With the great prevalence of English (even in Wales), we didn't think this would be a problem. Hee hee hee on us. We were fine with the grandmother, and her sister and the sister's husband. But the grandfather was tough; not only was his first language Welsh, but he also whispered and was going senile. Which means that not only could we not understand what he was saying, we couldn't HEAR what he was saying. Oh boy. I guess 50 years in the mines will do that to ya...
I loved this story and thought I'd share. In Wales, as in Ireland, all road signs are printed in Welsh as well as English. So recently a sign showe up that looked like this:
Looks like a regular road sign, right? Hee hee hee... wrong. The top (the English) is correct. I guess having designed that part, the highways office then sent that text to their translation service. The translator was not available, as their email response read (in Welsh) "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated." Hee hee again: the roads department assumed that that was the translation they asked for, and put it on the sign. Hence, the sign now read the English text on the tope and the "out of office" response on the bottom. Hee hee hee once again!
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