Israeli Journalists Insult Dutch Via Translation

An incident between Israel and Holland could have been much worse. Imagine if American journalists sent a message to Russian or Chinese government officials that came across like the ones noted by The Guardian – diplomatic incident would be putting it mildly.

"Helloh bud, enclosed five of the questions in honor of the foreign minister: The mother your visit in Israel is a sleep to the favor or to the bed your mind on the conflict are Israeli Palestinian," started off the mess. It got worse with subsequent questions, all plugged in online for translation according to the Jerusalem Post:

It continued with five nearly incomprehensible questions, and several other mentions of "mother."

"How could this e-mail possibly have been sent? These journalists have sparked a major, major incident," said an official from Israel’s Foreign Ministry. "Sure he can’t understand many of the questions, because the English is so bad. But he is being asked about the sleeping arrangements of his mother!"

The journalist who set up the trip was away from the newspaper, leaving someone with no practical knowledge of English plugging words into an online translator and sending email to the Dutch Foreign Ministry. The Jerusalem Post identified the site as babelfish.com, but that is a parked domain; the real translation would have been done on another site, possibly one linked from a page of results for "Dutch Translation Service" appearing on babelfish.com.

The PRWeek story suggests that the factors a CEO considers when making decisions “is a combination of information and experience, advisors and gut instinct, and PR pros have a critical role to play in this mix.”

I haven’t had a chance to go over the story-and won’t for a bit, since I’m about to go deliver a talk-but the email I received from Tim McHugh at Plesser Holland (handling PR for PRWeek, I guess) points to these findings:

• The search for talent is the biggest challenge for CEOs. (No surprise here-CEO Magazine’s annual survey always has recruiting and retention as a top CEO concern.)
• 77% of CEOs feel that digital/online strategy is important to the organization’s overall plans, but only 8% of CEO’s have blogs, and only 19% say they will start their own blog in the next two years.
• 77% of CEOs rank developing current customer relationships as one of their highest priorities, even above bringing in new business-addressing shareholder needs comes in last.

Have a look. When I get a chance, I’ll update this post with some observations.

Comments

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.

For the duration of the Vim project, Moolenaar has accepted sponsorships and donations to help support his work on Vim. He also encouraged users of Vim to donate to the ICCF Holland fund; that fund supports volunteer work in Kibaale, located in Uganda’s south, a place with the highest HIV infection rate in the world according to ICCF.

Now that Moolenaar has accepted a position with Google, he announced how the sponsorships and donations Vim users provide after the end of March will benefit ICCF:

Those who have paid for Vim in the past have been able to vote for features they felt Moolenaar should develop in Vim. That practice will continue after March 31st, the only difference being the donations will go to ICCF Holland instead of him.

Moolenaar also noted version 7 of Vim will enter beta testing shortly.

—

Add to | DiggThis | Yahoo! My Web

Drag this to your Bookmarks.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.