Legacy Magazine

by Kirk Carter Mona

Back in the ’90s, some of our friends moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa. This was right around when the fast-food chain Arby’s was looking to set itself apart from the competition. They tried a campaign where they appealed to adults’ wishes to eat somewhere without a ball crawl, happy meals, and screaming children. What they came up with was the campaign “Satisfy your grown-up tastes.” Perhaps you remember the commercials.

As we drove around Cedar Rapids we passed the local Arby’s. It was one of the many times in my life I lamented not having a camera with me. While putting up the promotional message under the sign out front, they must not have had enough letters to spell out “grown-up” so some enterprising employee substituted the synonym “adult” instead. I don’t think the marketing executives back at corporate would have approved of the racier reworded sign, “Satisfy your adult tastes here.” Whether or not this revised slogan improved business I can’t say.

Closer to home, a local McDonald’s sign with the ubiquitous “Over 99 Billion Served” once also sported the promotional slogan right underneath it reading, “Monopoly is Here.” Monopoly indeed.

There’s something about that type of sign with movable letters that inspires strange messages. Fast-food chains are not the only offenders. I once stopped into the gas station down the street from my house and tried in vain to explain what was wrong with their large sign outside proclaiming “2 hot dogs .99¢” I asked if they really meant to sell two hot dogs for less than a penny and was only met with blank stares. I was clearly taxing the linguistic and mathematical skills of the clerk. Looking at the shriveled up wieners on the roller grill, maybe they really did mean to sell two for 99 one-hundredths of a cent.

Just this past fall, I drove past a used car lot on the way to work and they had put up a baffling message on their sign. The message read, “Sorry, no apples, lemons only.” Something tells me this was not a successful marketing campaign for a used car lot. They are surrounded by apple orchards so I understood the first part of their sign but why on earth would a used car lot proudly proclaim they have nothing in stock but lemons? The sign was changed a few days later, but I wonder if someone within the company realized the error or if it had to be explained to them. I was amazed it lasted as long as it did.

In a column back in 2006, I wrote about all the stupid foot-in-mouth moments we have as interpreters. Add to that my recent oral fumble where in a moment of stuttering, I asked a group of fifth-graders a question about living in the city but the “C” in city accidentally came out more like a “Sh.” It was not the highlight of my interpretive career. The words we choose in our oral interpretive presentations are important, but these brief verbal mistakes are fleeting unless you happen to make the habit of recording and broadcasting all of your programs. Perhaps even more important to get right the first time are the words we put into writing. We want to make our message clear and convey the information about the resource correctly to the visitor. With this in mind, I’d recommend avoiding a mistake made in Wales this past fall. All street signs are required to be in both English and Welsh, so the Swansea council sent the text of a new road sign to their translator via e-mail. When they received a prompt reply in Welsh they put it on the sign.

It didn’t take long for local residents who actually spoke Welsh to inform them that the Welsh half of their new expensive road sign read, “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.”

Mistranslations, embarrassing double entendres, and glaring typos aside, interpretive research tells us that visitors spend very little time reading text. Many visitors won’t read anything but the title on an interpretive display and those that do venture further into written interpretation may spend only seconds gleaning the meaning of your message. Make sure the message you send is clear, concise, and accurate or you may end up selling two hot dogs for .99 cents.

Kirk Mona is the outreach coordinator for the Lee and Rose Warner Nature Center in Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota. He has been an NAI member since 1996.