Czech Olympic Committee annihilates English language We don't know quite what is going on down at the Czech Olympic Committee, which recently announced its intention to pitch for the 2016 Olympics, but we reckon it's employed one of the Lads from Lagos to write the English version of its promotional website. Try the fascinating history of the country's previous bids, which begins …
This style looks familiar. I think I've seen it, perhaps here:
INSTRUCTIONS: For results that can be the finest, it is our advising that: NEVER to hold these buttons two times!! Except the battery. Next Taking the (something) earth section may cause a large occurrence! However. If this is not a trouble, such rotation is a very maintainence action, as a kindly (something) viewpoint from Drawing B.
What's so funny? This sounds exactly like a typical conversation between my grandparents and their non Czech neighbors, who also spoke broken Italianish or Polackish or Frogish in NYC.
Just to defend our European friends and probably your ancestors; most speak two or three other European languages. How many does the average American or Brit speak? My Grandmother spoke five languages fluently besides Czech (unfortunately English was not one of them) - French (frog croaking), German/Austrian, Italian, Hungarian and Ukranian, after a Masters degree from Prague University in Literature, something no so uncommon for a big percentage of Czechs and Czech women in the first decade of the 1900's.
Ps, The poster is CORRECT. The Czechs DID invent the term ROBOT and NO this does not at all sound like a Babelfish translation.
The majority of people in the country (or at least in Prague) don't actually WANT the Olympics there, knowing that it's a risky project with uncertain ROI, requiring the construction of a lot of infrastructure and its subsequent abandonment (since it's highly unlikely to find use for the facilities once the games are over), not to mention the death of the olympic ideal. But never mind that, the politicians want it, perhaps to show the rest of us how stupid we are for failing to see the "prestige" of such an event.
Someone has taken it word for word from a Czech>English dictionary. This is what happens when you don't understand context and grammar.
And not all us Brits can only speak English (and a poor version at that). Some of us also understand Franglais.. (improvise French accent before attempting) "Dooo yoooo 'ave ze rezervazyion?" or the old favourite "Dooo yooo parlais ze English?".
"The majority of people in the country (or at least in Prague) don't actually WANT the Olympics there, knowing that it's a risky project with uncertain ROI, "
That sounds like +every+ country that "wants" to host a major event. For example, most South Africans are dreading the 2010 Soccer World Cup. And with us, it's not that the politicians think we're failing to see appreciate the "prestige", it's more like it's yet another opportunity for them to make obscene amounts of money through graft and corruption.
Are you sure this is supposed to be an official presentation? It looks more like a blog, the domain is registered to an individual (see whois), and it doesn't even display the COC logo. There is at least one official resource, with considerably higher legibility, at http://www.olympiada.cz.mdm.etn.cz/olymp/jnp/en/home/index.html . (I personally don't like how they use the word "Czech" as a noun, but this is a highly controversial topic in its own right...)
How ironic! And tomorrow is the annual European Day of Languages:
http://ec.europa.eu/education/policies/lang/awareness/day_en.html
And all of this fascination and countless hours vainly invested in machine translation to very little avail, because mainly unilingual linguaphobes cannot bring themselves to investigate, or even inform themselves properly, about an alternative which time and time again proves that it functions perfectly adequately in real-life situations, and whose basic grammar can be grasped by most people after only a few hours study. I'm talking of course about 'universal bilingualism' and the inter-language Esperanto:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaedeutic_value_of_Esperanto
http://www.polskieradio.pl/eo/
http://lingvo.org/xx/2/3
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