I Could Be Your Consultant
I was minding my own business, watching The Men Who Stare at Goats, when I noticed this:
It may be slightly hard to see in the low-res screenshot I’ve uploaded, but the sign on the right reads Baghdad twice, once in English and once in Arabic. The Arabic version is wrong in a number of ways:
- The characters in the word ‘Baghdad’ are written in the wrong order. Arabic is written right to left, but the character ‘ﺏ’ (sounds like ‘b’) in the sign is on the left hand side. This would be like seeing a sign for Las Vegas in an Arabic film which reads ’sageV saL’.
- Most characters in Arabic join to the one which comes after them, unless the character in consideration is the final one in the word. In other words (get it?), they are cursive. They haven’t got this right either. This is almost like seeing a sign for Las Vegas in an Arabic film which reads ’sAgEv sAl’.
I also noticed the exact same kind of mistakes on the landing cards they give you when you arrive at Heathrow airport. The cards have whole paragraphs of text with these errors. I’m guessing that people who speak Arabic are hired to write the text in the first place. So my question is, how does this still get through?
They’re not very good at it?
I can imagine the pay for Arabic Language consultant at Heathrow airport isn’t that much. But I’m sure if you pointed out some of their errors, say that they are consistent and offer a half decent consultancy rate - they might go for it. Would make some nice temp work between jobs…
Or just set up your own Arabic Translation business online or something…
Mark