Road sign: out of office
Suppose you’re an English speaking person working in a Welsh town. Your boss tells you to construct a traffic sign telling lorries to stay off of a certain road. This being Wales, the sign has to be bilingual. You send an email to the in-house translation service, asking for the Welsh version of “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only”. You promptly receive an email containing only the following:
Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i’w gyfieithu.
Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? It’s two sentences and it’s about the same length. You send everything off to the sign making company and a few days later, there’s a shiny new sign to keep English and Welsh truck drivers out of the local residential area.
Except that in Welsh, the sign reads, “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.”