On Be Look Professional

Many years ago (1967 or so), I bought a wonderful Yamaha 250 cc motorcycle, the manual for which had this instruction for shifting gears:

Tachometer tells the moment to do.

Unfortunately, the RPMs given for gear shiftng kept this very fast motorcycle operating a little slower than a motor scooter. One evening, I told a friend who had ridden behind the original owner that the instructions couldn't be right and he offered to ride behind me and tell me when to shift. He did not look at the tachometer. He used his ears. I suppose the manual could have said.

Ears tell the moment to do.

Once I got the pitch right, I was golden. I suspect that some junior executive at Yahama persuaded his bosses that his English was excellent and he could ably translate the manual. On balance he didn't do badly.

Today, I happend across a web site while hunting for information as to what might be down the line for Blackberry phones given the buzz surrounding the iPhone and the new Androd phones. I came across this paragraph.

The Blackberry mobile phones are looking professionals and stylish mobile phone with can peoples are attract to this phone. Blackberry is the smart phones which is the most popular in the world with its charming features. It offers accessibility to an extensive variety of applications many wireless instruments across the world. It provides accessibility to an extensive variety of applications on several wireless instruments across the globe. by data and other services.

This piece of prose shocked me even more than that Yamaha manual.

This articale comes from Weblineindia, a link to which is associated with the blog title. That's what's shocking. If I have prejudices in regard to India, they are (1) Indians are very smart and very well-educated; (2) Many if not most Indians know English either natively or fluently; and (3) India has a bunch of great cuisines.

I clicked on the link and the first paragraph that popped up was this one:

Now a day ecommerce is a very popular among the internet users, so what is Ecommerce? People are habituated to sell and purchase their products or any types of items on the internet, its called ecommerce, and to online sell products you need ecommerce web...

So, it only gets worse. It is possible that these articles were written in some regional Indian language and run through some bad translating program. More likely, we are dealing with people who have big brains (see prejudice 1 above) but smal English language centers (see apparently false prejudice 2).

These articles are represented as "free content for your website or blog," which further confirms the axiom that you get what you pay for. I know that what I am writing is rather snobish, possibly even mean-spirited, for I would seem to be making fun of people who are, after all, doing their best. To that, I say, "bullshit." If I planned to publish something in German or Spanish I sure as hell wouldn't translate it myself.

Surely, if you are actually trying to inform people, to say nothing of sell things to them, you will want to do better than this:

The Blackberry Solution is used to access mobile email and personal information. Also other of the self applications are also used. But the development Blackberr software for the solution of Blackberry. Also Blackberry application, for assistance if issues arise.

This reads as if they are offering some sort of spyware ("access personal information"). If that isn't true, then they are very engaging in linguistic self-abuse.