'English well talking' and other ironic business claims

Few things are more ironic than signs that use poor grammar and spelling to proudly declare fluency in another language. For example, some U.S. business signs attempting to state "Spanish is spoken here" (se habla espanol), are misspelled as something like "se hablo espanol." Popular English examples include signs reportedly seen on a Majorcan shop entrance declaring, "English Well Talking" and "Here Speeching American."

Curious signs like these unintentionally demonstrate just how little the guilty parties know about their self-declared second languages. We condescendingly smirk and shake our heads at their blunders, believing that we would never make such an embarrassing mistake. Such blunders are surely rare occurrences limited to small, backward towns far from our corporate and professional worlds, right?

In reality, such mistakes occur frequently, but we usually look right through them. What would you do if I were trying to sell you something and said, "我會說英文, 您需要幫忙嗎?" What?

Most reading this article probably do not understand Chinese, so you would have no idea what was written above in Chinese characters. Readers who do understand Chinese will see the irony in the fact that it reads, “I can speak English. May I help you?” Why would someone selling to an English speaker ever send a message in Chinese characters? Though speaking to the target audience in a language they do not understand sounds like a ridiculous idea, it is actually common. Companies ranging from million-dollar small businesses to billion-dollar corporate giants attempt to market to international clients with similar futility when they fail to follow what I call "the Golden Rule of Localization": speak the language of the buyer.

One multibillion-dollar technology company has a Japanese-language website that attempts to guide its visitors to other-language versions of the site via a language drop-down menu in the site's top right corner. If potential customers manage to find this drop-down menu on the all-Japanese Web page, they see the following three language options: "英語," "フランス語" and "ドイツ語." How very helpful! These options clearly mark where to click to find the English translation, right?