Yesterday I needed to open a zip file on my mobile phone, so I had my first encounter with ZipMan, which was preinstalled on the phone; I knew it was there, but I never used it in two years with my Nokia 6600. After the program started, I was presented with this cryptic message (in Italian):
“Lime del Zip del socio con ZipMan?”
It’s so completely meaningless that it took me a few seconds to realize what it meant, then I almost fell on the floor laughing. I don’t know if “to file” in English is used in the sense of working on an object with a file (the tool, not the computer abstraction), but if that’s the case, the back-translation to English could be (with some interpretation, as the original is incorrect to start with):
“File the Zip of the associate with ZipMan?”
I’m sure none of my associates would like me to apply a file to their zips.
The traslation is so completely wrong that it was probably made with an automated tool and certainly not checked by someone who speaks Italian. The original English sentence must have been something like:
“Associate Zip files with ZipMan?”
and the correct Italian translation would be:
“Associare i file Zip con ZipMan?”
There is an important lesson to be learned here:
- Translations should always be made by someone whose native language is the destination language: at least they will be grammatically and syntactically correct.
In the end, ZipMan didn’t work at all on the file I was trying to open, so I installed s60zip and used that. It is supposed to asociate itself with zip files too, but it didn’t. Maybe it’s because I installed it before removing ZipMan. But at least it didn’t make me laugh.