Ali Express

[Kitwn]

This made me think of a snowboarding holiday in Switzerland where my mate who has a very broad Barnsley accent, (just think Broad Yorkshire accent on steroids) was trying to chat up a french bird and I had to translate from "Barnsglish" to "Yorksglish" so this poor lass had half a chance of understanding English, let's just say he never got any tail...

As every Englishman knows, the way to make a foreigner understand you is to speak loudly and with slow, exaggerated articulation. This is a characteristic of the normal Yorkshire accent, especially when speaking to people from Lancashire.

[JAZZCNC]

As every Englishman knows, the way to make a foreigner understand you is to speak loudly and with slow, exaggerated articulation. This is a characteristic of the normal Yorkshire accent, especially when speaking to people from Lancashire.

We don't speak to Lancastrian's we use universal sign language. The same one we learned from speaking with smart-arse Aussies...

[Kitwn]

We don't speak to Lancastrian's we use universal sign language. The same one we learned from speaking with smart-arse Aussies...

[cropwell]

There is the old joke about the first computer program to translate between Russian and English. They put the phrase 'Out of sight, out of mind' into it and it came out in Russian. Then they put the Russian phrase back in and it came out as 'Invisible idiot'.

[Neale]

It's easy to make mistakes in a foreign language. Back in her school days, my daughter had to say something in class about her recent trip to France, so she said, "when you go into a room, you have to kiss everyone." She checked the word for "kiss" in her dictionary. Unfortunately, the translation she used had another, more common, use, and what she ended up saying was, "When you go into a room, you have to shag everyone." Fortunately, no-one but the teacher understood what she said...

[cropwell]

Pissed off with myself. It looks as if I have been scammed 3 times with goods bought from Facebook adverts. A graphics input tablet for £30 was delivered yesterday. It is little more than a kid's etch-a-sketch and certainly not the goods pictured and described. I will be pursuing through Paypal and Facebook. This prompted me to check the other two things I bought and it looks as though they are also dodgy. I also bought some 2TB memory sticks from eBay and they test out as 590MB*. So they are going to be refunded. If the vendor doesn't want to play fair then I will take it through the returns procedure.

*It is easy to spoof the capacity, because Windows reads it from the firmware in the device.

I found out that 'flog it and run' scams use tracked delivery services, so it is hard to argue you didn't get the goods - even if they sent you a pair of socks not an iPhone.

I feel that Amazon, eBay and AliExpress have a relatively good customer service. For their own commercial viability. they certainly want to protect the trust in their platform and refund readily in the case of faulty or mis-described goods. Facebook on the other hand don't seem to give a flying shite about anything.

Returning to the tales of mistranslation :- At school I had to learn and recite a classic French poem 'La Cigale et La Formi' (the Grasshopper and the Ant) and got one word wrong. Bite instead of Bise (Quand la bise fut venue - When winter came) Bite means cock (Le todger). Again the teacher laughed and wouldn't tell anyone why.

[cropwell]

Pissed off with myself. It looks as if I have been scammed 3 times with goods bought from Facebook adverts. A graphics input tablet for £30 was delivered yesterday. It is little more than a kid's etch-a-sketch and certainly not the goods pictured and described. I will be pursuing through Paypal and Facebook. This prompted me to check the other two things I bought and it looks as though they are also dodgy. I also bought some 2TB memory sticks from eBay and they test out as 590MB*. So they are going to be refunded. If the vendor doesn't want to play fair then I will take it through the returns procedure.

Well the Etch-a-sketch has been refunded, so I have got a free kid's toy and the seller of the memory sticks told me to put it through the eBay Returns procedure and he will refund me when he gets the things back.