Your mistakes aren't so bad after all

One of the most popular blog posts I had here during the past year was one in which readers were invited to share their most embarrassing moments while learning Spanish. But even the worst mistakes the readers of this site have made aren't as bad as one made by a certain language instructional company based in Siusun City, Calif. (Because I've read the company's Better Business Bureau report, I'm not going to provide a link to the company and give it free publicity.)

One would think that a company that specializes in teaching people Spanish (and other languages) would have someone on staff who speaks the language. But apparently not: On the page where the potential customer provides account information, the site prominently provides this translation of "You're just moments away from speaking Spanish":

Usted es momentos justos lejos del español del discurso.

You don't need to know a lot of Spanish to have a concept of how bad that translation is: For starters, while you might say momentos justos to mean "appropriate moments," you'd never use justos in saying something that means "mere moments." While lejos can mean "away," it seems nonsensical to say that a person can be "away" from conversational Spanish. (Even if you could use lejos in this sentence, you'd use estar as the main verb instead of es, as students learn in Spanish 101.) And why not use the obvious translation, hablar español, for "speaking Spanish"? To a native speaker, the sentence would be unintelligible.

The problem here is that the company either had a employee look up words in a dictionary and do a simple word substitution, or someone at the company relied on language translation software. And last time I checked, translation software isn't very good, to say the least.

In other words, a company that makes money by telling people how to learn a foreign language just showed how to do everything wrong. Now that's embarrassing.