Talking of things from the past unexpectedly surfacing: here’s a newspaper cutting which I saved in 1985. (Good grief, that’s 25 years ago! Ahem . . . ) I mislaid it for a while, and then was delighted to find it again a few months ago.
It dates from my time living in Bangor, North Wales, and is a letter to the local free newspaper. There was an election coming up. Bilingual leaflets were produced by the parties, in English and Welsh. Well sort of. Here is one resident’s reaction to what came through the letterbox:
From the free Bangor newspaper, c. 1984
By the way, some of the spellings in the above make more sense if you’re familiar with the basics of Welsh pronunciation and with the Gwynedd local accent: for example, ffrynt in the first sentence is an almost perfect representation in Welsh spelling of how the English word front would be pronounced locally.
Now the question in my mind is: how bad are the translations in today’s election campaigns? Have they improved at all? My hope is that they have, but I wouldn’t be too surprised to hear that they haven’t.
Anyone know?
The Other Blog Without A Name 
Too funny! The only question I have is: how did the letter writer know that there was only 1 spelling error in the English leaflet??
Yes, I wondered that too. It implies that the ones they didn’t find didn’t exist, and even a professional proofreader wouldn’t make that claim.
It could just be that after proofreading the Welsh half, they only had enough concentration left to find one spelling mistake in the English!