A few month back, we got a letter (below) from a customer asking to purchase some of our products. Although we deal mostly with e-mail nowadays, we can still handle snail mail order. However, this snail mail order was different, it was in the country’s second official language – French. I blame the Ontario school system for not teaching me enough French to understand what the letter was saying so it took me a full hour to translate this short paragraph using Google Translate and manually guessing each word. Looking at the letter below, it’s very apparent the auto-translate feature will not work.
After an hour of guessing and translation, we finally figured out what the letter was saying but this wasn’t it. In the letter, she (the sender) mentioned that she don’t understand English so a reply in English will not work. Once again, Google Translate saved the day.
Three weeks later (the time scale for snail mail is days, not nanoseconds)…a happy customer.
