The other day at work I was asked to proofread a page that included instructions on how our company is trying to create a common company culture. The person who wrote it originally does not have the best English skills and there were a lot of things that had been translated literally from Swedish, so it was more work than I expected. One phrase that had been used was “find new ways” (hitta nya v\u00e4gar<\/i>), and it sounded very Swenglish to me in the context that was wanted (finding AND making) so I changed it to “forge new paths” instead.<\/p>\n
He came back later and said that he had reacted quite strongly to the word forge<\/i> and had asked two other Swedes, who both agreed with him, that it was a negative<\/b> word. At this point, I’m just staring at him with a blank look on my face. WTF? Then he says, “you know, like forging MONEY.”<\/p>\n
OOOOH<\/i> THAT kind of forge!<\/b><\/p>\n
I explained that “forge” isn’t a negative word and that, in fact, while the ACT of forging money is a negative thing in a societal context, the word ITSELF has many other uses, none of them negative.<\/p>\n
He wouldn’t believe me and I finally said, fine, use “find new paths” just to get him to go away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The other day at work I was asked to proofread a page that included instructions on how our company is trying to create a common company culture. The person who wrote it originally does not have the best English skills and there were a lot of things that had been translated literally from Swedish, so it was more work than I expected. One phrase that had been used was “find new ways” (hitta nya v\u00e4gar), and it sounded very Swenglish to me in the context that was wanted (finding AND making) so I changed it to “forge new paths” instead....<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6542,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions\/6542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lizardek.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}