This complaint is not about a poorly written television script, but I couldn’t resist a departure from that topic. A short segment on the local news last evening told of a North Carolina restaurant owner who had posted a sign forbidding service to those who do not speak English.
The shameless boldness of the proprietor is stunning enough. His obtuseness is made worse by his display of ignorance of foreign languages and his own so-called “American English.”
The sign attempts to tell customers, in six languages, that they are not welcome if they don’t speak English. Two of the languages, Russian and Irish Gaelic, I don’t know enough about to critique the restaurant owner’s rendering of them. However, here are the attempts to inform speakers of French, German, Spanish, and “American,” with his helpful parenthetic explanations:
N parler français, pas de service.
(French)
Kein Deutsch sprechen. Kein service.
(German)
No hablar español. Sin servicio.
(Spanish)
Wrong, wrong, wrong! That the printed texts utilize the cedilla and the tilde (Also, the Russian text appears in Cyrillic characters.) leads me to assume that the sign maker used an online translator—Not a reliable translation method.
But here is the best:
No speak English. No Service
(American English)
The restaurant owner has now removed the sign, after much criticism. He says that he posted it in frustration after a group of Spanish-speaking patrons had difficulty ordering. We don’t expect the guy to have a translator on staff, but at least he could get a better command of his own language!
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