Does anyone in Har Nof speak English?
ByAs you may have seen over the years as being an Anglo in Israel, from time to time you will see advertisements with spelling mistakes or errors. Sometimes they make you smile, but most of the time you cringe and wonder why the business/printer didn’t find an Anglo to look it over? I mean if you are targeting Anglos then they must be close by. Just grab one off the street and take 2 minutes of their time to look over an advertisement that you are obviously spending thousands of shekels on. WE DON’T BITE and we are very happy to help!
But today I have seen the absolute worst use of English on an advertisement in my 8 years of living in this country. It comes from a business in Har Nof. I point that out, because I do believe there may be one or two or 20,000 English speakers living there. After looking it over I found not less than 14 mistakes. Now that wouldn’t be so bad if it was a 3000 word advertisement but there is less than 60 words on it. And the mistakes are not just grammar, but really silly spelling mistakes.
Take a look at it below and let me know how many mistakes you find. (Not in this blog post, just in the Ad 
)
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4 Comments
January 12th, 2011 at 6:53 pm
You mean “there”, not “their”. That is by far the worst one I’ve seen as well. There was a woman from Neve Yaakov years back who went around to a bunch of restaurants to offer to help fix their menus (not every Anglo wants to eat a “berger”) and absolutely nobody was interested. It may be because they’ve already invested in printing their (messed up) material, or because they know they won’t really lose customers over it – I don’t think anyone has walked out of a restaurant or any other establishment because a few vowels were off.
On the other hand, I don’t think I would allow that guy to clean my clothing – I’m not convinced he can read the washing instructions (or at least his graphic designer can’t).
January 13th, 2011 at 12:12 am
You write “After looking it over I found less than 14 mistakes.”
Perhaps you meant to say “…I found NOT less than 14 mistakes.”
January 13th, 2011 at 8:19 am
Thanks! Fixed
January 14th, 2011 at 8:18 am
Alibaba.com bears similarly egregious errors. Advertisers there are making millions and billions of dollars (check it out). I suspect that they share the same attitude as Israeli advertisers with textually challenged advertising materials: they don’t care. They lack a sense of pride/honor AND they save money by not spending any on proof readers. They don’t sense a need for admirable language skills. Just keep raking in the cash from poorly prepared ads, baby.
There’s a sad sense of fatalism going on in Israel: “I tried. If it works, fine. If not, who cares?” People fail to answer the question: “‘I’ should care!”
Board an Israeli bus. Observe riders taking legally designated spots for the disabled and forcing blind, lame and other disabled riders to limp along elsewhere bumps, bruises and hurt feelings be damned. Watch men force women and girls to sit in the back seats in the manner that the American south treated black-skinned human beings decades ago (use your eyelids, fellas. Close ‘em or take a taxi if you despise female riders and/or wish to pose as fake tzadikim. My heroes the avot would never have behaved as you do). See passengers clambering for seats atop aisle-seat riders who refuse to budge so someone else can sit down comfortably and gracefully next to the window.
I’ve wanted to make PSAs extolling the virtues of personal integrity and pleasant behavior since making 2002 aliya. I am daunted by a society-wide lack of concern over personal reputations among dishonest kablanim, clerks, mayors, medical profession members (I hesitate to call them medical “professionals.”) etc.
Rich, all of us posting here decry the realities that lead to foolish advertising such as the example above. But the integrity-challenged technique will not change until society requires that change. Israel does not seem to hunger for respect, honor, personal pride and a sense of accomplishment.
Failure seems to be a popular option here. I hope that olim from Western countries will spread our integrity-based mindset throughout Israeli society somehow.