This Pidgin English/German/French apology of a kind was found on the entrance to the Ferrocarril trains to Sóller station in Palma yesterday. In case you don’t get the message: train services from Palma to Sóller are suspended until January 31st, 2011, due to work on the railway tracks.
I find it appalling that a place like Mallorca with close to 12,000,000 visitors per year, half of them of foreign origin, most of whom speak either English or German or French, can’t be addressed in a grammatically correct manner when addressed in their own idiom. I reckon that at least 100,000 tourists use the railway connection to Sóller every year, resulting in an income to Ferrocarril de Sóller S. A. of at least 2,000,000 €. It can’t cost more than 50 € per language to have a proper translation done of a simple sentence such as: We apologize for any inconvenience that this may have caused.
Shame on you, Ferrocarril de Sóller S. A.
Dammit. It just makes me very angry to witness incompetence.
The photo was taken in Palma de Mallorca, Baleares, Spain. The date: December 17th, 2010. The time was 16:27:58.
The Mallorca Photo Blog 
Here in Andorra we are used to such mangling of the language. We agree with your thoughts on the subject but at least they have got the Union Jack up the right way – often it’s not.
Sylvia
Oh dear. I guess that you’re a tad upset 🙂
I like it.
It makes me feel uncomfortable when abroad that all the clever dick locals speak as good English as me.
Being abroad my Englesh it sounds betterer.
Cannot agree more.
I am actually collecting bad translations as they can be quite funny at times! It does boggle the mind that companies which are literally surrounded daily by native speakers of these languages, can´t be bothered simply to step outside their office/restaurant and simply approach somebody in the street (free of charge!)to check that something is correctly written!
My favourite to date was on a menu where, strangely, they decided to translate Spaghetti Carbonara into English. It read “Noodles turned to charcoal”!