Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Aviso para servi co legal

My daughter got a ticket for not wearing her seat belt a few weeks ago. Actually, she was wearing her seat belt, but she got stopped for speeding. The state trooper gave her the ticket for speeding, then took it back, changed it to a seat belt violation, and proceeded to tell her that there is a nice young man at his church that she should meet. That is a story in itself, but the gem in this tale came in the mail a few days later.


Some of the law offices here will send out advertisements for legal services as soon as you get a traffic violation. That's why my kids have never been able to get away with not telling me what happened. Danielle received one in particular that is a classic in our book. In an attempt to be culturally sensitive and reach the growing Latino market, the advertisement was printed in English on one side and in a form of Spanish on the other. At least, I think that is supposed to be in Spanish. The errors are so many and so varied that we have spent hours just laughing about it. Folks, in Spanish, accent marks DO make a difference. As a matter of fact, in this example, it was the difference between saying we have been in north Carolina (capitalization error intentional) 50 years, and we have 50 anus' in north Carolina!


Danielle went to the lawyer's office to offer her assistance. To our shock, the receptionist who looked like she was bored with her job and with her life informed us that she could not read Spanish, and that they had not one, but TWO interpreters on staff!

Danielle left her contact information and requested that the lawyer call her, which he did. After explaining some of the more egregious errors, he told her that letter had been circulating for over a year and no one had said anything about it. No doubt they were too busy laughing their *ss*s off!


Each individual error may be hard to see in this scanned copy, but trust me when I say that every underlined word or phrase is an error. Since it is a letter from a law firm, and I don't want to risk tangling with them, I have whited out the actual name of the firm. But if you really want to know who the culprit is, or get a clearer scanned copy, feel free to contact me.


To my English only friends, not much of this will make sense. However, I will draw your attention to the last sentence which has six colons and no periods. Maybe they just ran out of dots!

2 comments:

  1. Hilarious! Thanks for sharing.

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  2. Stumbled upon your site from twitter. After reading this, I'm amazed on how they thought this paper was well "written."

    I really like your blog. Good job! :-)

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