Another funny sign in Thailand with very poor translation

One of the things you'll notice if you have lived in this country even for a little bit of time is that they really go out of their way to try to accommodate the English language and for this I am extremely grateful. They are under no obligation to do this and if they decided not to, most of the expat community including myself would be lost and confused basically all the time.

We are very fortunate us English-speakers because of their attempts to accommodate us. There have been times where I was traveling in other countries such as Korea where there was no English translation on signs and this meant that if you didn't have electronic resources to help you get around, you basically had no idea where to go. Of course the major cities accommodate English in most places around the world but again, it's not like this is required.

Thai is an immensely difficult language and shares no similarities with any other language except for maybe Laos, which looks somewhat similar. If I was trying to read most European languages I would at least have a chance because we use the same or at least similar alphabet with a few extra characters. Thai, as one comedian once hilariously put it, looks like cake decoration

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The above is just the consonants as well. There are vowels and lots of them and they all have long and short versions that completely change the pronunciation as well as the meaning of words. Let's just say that it is really tough.

It also doesn't translate directly according to some people that I know that speak it much better than I do. So if a person is planning on using something like googletranslate in order to get things done get ready for a pile of nonsense to be delivered to the recipient. If you want to have a try at this go and type a sentence or two into translate, get the Thai result, then reverse the languages and translate the Thai back into English. It will more often than not be nonsense.

So I do appreciate the fact that this language is very difficult and mistakes will be made. This doesn't mean that I can't laugh at the mistakes though and this is especially true when it is some sort of municipal sign that the government paid for like this one.

According to a friend of mine who reads Thai this says phonetically "rawang kon da bawt" which means "caution blind person in the area." Which is actually really good that they would go out of their way to try to protect this one person like that.

How they ended up with BE BLIND from that translation is a huge mystery to anyone I know that speaks English and Thai. There is no logical reason for why it is that this was the translation that they came up with.

Now here is the reason why stuff like this happens on municipal signs frequently. Thai officials are notoriously arrogant and do not want to admit that they need the help of specialists in some particular discipline and especially do not want to admit that a foreigner might be necessary for a process.

With the employment of just one foreigner per province they could eliminate all mistakes like this by simply showing them their plans and asking "is this correct or is it funny / nonsense?" I think that would be a great job to have actually because you ability to read Thai wouldn't really be necessary. Thus far I don't know of anyone that has been approached by the government to ensure that what they are producing actually makes sense or not. I know a guy that offered this service to the local government for FREE and they never contacted him.

Oh well, part of what makes this country to much fun is the little nuances like this where they almost get it, but not quite. In the end we only really needed the picture to make the connection as to what they are talking about in the end anyway.