Foreigners will eventually learn to speak it proper like wot we do.

Innit

A pint of Real Ale for you, not (US) Budweiser

A full-size pint at that

It depends on how much you want to drink. Personally, I'd prefer an Imperial pint of a good ale than a (larger) US pint of Bud (or similar left-pondian mouthwash).

And it had better be the full 568ml.

“ A pint of Real Ale for you, not (US) Budweiser”

What about a real Czech Budvar.

Like wot we does, surely.

No problem.

Soon, we're going to marvel at how pseudo-AI is capable of understanding us so well.

Then, we're going to wonder why Terminator was a documentary . . .

They must have used Colin's code to mess up this site too!

An education company... translating with regexes... yeah, no way this can go wrong.

Like a hand grenade in kindergarten...

>"Our system combined tackling spelling swaps like changing 'ae' to 'e' in words like 'archaeology' and word/phrase swaps so that British terms like 'post' were changed to the American 'mail.'"

I was wondering if this was going to screw up the web service calls

Icon as he'll need some SOAP soon

On my first trip to the US I had to present to a room full of developers. I had given it several times in the UK. After an hour I put up a chart saying "Fag break" - every one sat there bemused.

I said "Cigarette break?!" and every one got up.

I also learned on that trip that you park on the driveway and drive on the parkway.

At a conference where there was simultaneous translation from English into French, German and Italian, someone was going though a dump

"At offset Baker Dog Dog"... there was laughter as the French heard ".. Boulanger, Chien, Chien"

If you pencil in something that you later need to change, remember to ask for an eraser.

At least he had his own, and didn't have to ask if he can "bum a fag"

With the current morons in charge that could get you locked up :(.

Or a night out with some of them.

“ With the current morons in charge that could get you locked up :(.”

You mean he has an exclusive? And which way round?

A colleague of mine was working on a machine in Canada and he needed to clean the edge connectors on the circuit boards so asked if anyone had a rubber on them.

If you pencil in something that you later need to change, remember to ask for an eraser.

Unless it's the date with your tottie.

I recall my schoolroom French also had la gomme which is pretty much the English( UK) without the the double entendre but going to a French lumber yard and asking for a "preservative" might occasion some Gallic hilarity and the directions to the nearest apothecary.

The "Trousers - Pants - Shorts" debate is the one that keeps giving for me. Trying to explain that, or at least the differences between British English and US English versions of them, to Swedes is always fun.

This gets even worse if you're from Lancashire - I've only ever heard "pants" used here like NA do, and tends to set off the rest of the UK just the same.

No idea what the "shorts" bit is though, I read them as those half-pants (or half-trousers, if you like).

I'm a belt, braces, and suspenders guy, myself. And yes, I have been known to cut down a tree or two.

Buttered scones for tea on Wednesday?

Are you okay?

Having been to the US many times in the past, I got into an auto-translate mode in my mind, so I used American words and expressions in a Northern England accent.

It generally worked though later as a tourist we travelled through Carson City, NV which has a railroad museum. There was a rally of 50s period autos going on in the parking lot there which prompted confusion over the word 'car' in the museum. They use 'car' for our railway carriages...

Early this year a friend shared a screen-shot of his weather app predicting "Snow expected to autumn in the next hour".

And Windows was telling me that it "Last ticked for updates" a month ago...

I can't find the details about it now but back in the Vista days one of the languages for Vista had an issue where they'd translated both "Sleep" and "Hibernate" into the same word

"changing 'ae' to 'e' in words like 'archaeology'"

Do they really spell archaeology like that over there? It's another thing that could go wrong with Anglo-Saxon words where it would need to be rendered as an 'a'. e.g. Ælfred to Alfred.

Yes they do. See also Mediaeval. Furthermore, Americans with celiac disease sometimes get diarrhea. Whereas British coeliacs sometimes get diarrhoea.

But, Vincent Truck Gogh? That's confusing as the band called Camper Van Beethoven are American.

On the subject of bands & singers...

Repeat 100 times: "Randy Vanwarmer is not a funny name, he does not go dogging".

How do they spell the name of that bit of water between Greece and Turkey?

I work in the UK and my current customer is in the UK.

But the head office of my company is in the US, and so I have to write in Simplified English (American) spellings. It drives me up the wall.

The group head office is in Ireland where they also write English using the correct spellings.

I am waiting for the customer's customer (the MOD) to reject about 100,000 pages of documentation as it is in Simplified English, but no-one in the company will listen!

Expect disappointment. Nobody reads documentation.

I deliberately spell everything in UK English... Because it's the right thing to do.

First thing to do would have been to populate a CMS with the UK English version from the HTML data, then make the website serve from the CMS, then auto-translate from UK English to Merkin in the CMS, then proof read and tidy up the Merkin version.

> running the replacements directly on the body HTML, and causing lots of page repaints, meant we had to build a REST API

Ok, IANAWD but - immediate response to "static HTML" was "tricksy problem, especially with regexes, but at least you only need to translate each static page once, manually patch any edge cases, save the new static pages in a directory en-us/". Put a trigger into version control on the en-gb/ originals (or set up Make...) to re-process when edited.

But - repaints? REST API? Not cause slowdown? Is this a new definition of "static" page?

Then again, this is a "Who, me?"...

[1] I Am Not A Web Dev

Going from WYSIWYG to WYSIWTF in three simple awk...

That reminds me of the process known as "Rogeting" - using a thesaurus to replace words, often used by students to make their essays unique.

The classic is "sinister buttocks", a reference to the American "No Child Left Behind Act" of 2001.

“Rogeting”

How to you pronounce that?

Surely you mean Vinpenny truck gough?

Americans' vans and British vans are pretty nearly entirely the same thing; it's trucks* and lorries where we disagree. And I don't think I've heard of Vincent Lorry Gogh.

* unless you're delving into some of the slightly more obscure meanings of 'truck', or its verbed form

There was the AD&D magic item compendium where someone was obviously offended by the term "mage" as the updated class name was now "wizard" so they did a search and replace. Badly. So we now had magic items doing "6d6 points of dawizard" to the target.

I can imagine a flaming redheaded insane maga, homicidal gun crazy Vincent ' truck ' Gogh living in a trailer park † called Yard of Eden in the rather dangerous Easter Hoods of some urban planning disaster. ‡

A reworked A Clockwork Orange screenplay featuring this wholly ¶ American nutter could be the next Netflix triumph also with the very real likelihood of his being elected the next president of the US.

† caravan (~ trailer) park with more (white) trailer trash . ‡ any post-colonial US city. ¶ wholey

The word "van" is (almost) never capitalized in Dutch surnames, but certainly not for Vincent van Gogh.

It is Vincent van Gogh, meaning " from Gogh", which refers to the German city his ancestors hailed from.

And the -ogh is pronounced like in "loch", not like in "go".

See also that well-known holy site in India, the Harimandir Sahib, also known as the Golden Temple, at Amriczar.

Why is it that Americans seem unable to deal with UK English. We in the UK seem to manage to deal with the US version. We have to. There is never any US to UK translation.