"Out of office" (OOO) messages are generally a blessing. Set your email to wham back a "go away" message every time you fancy a break and you can quickly and immediately lower expectations as to when you will get round to that particulary pressing job of removing staples with your eyeball or whatever the task de la jour happens to be. Likewise, on the other end, you know exactly how disappointed to be at not receiving your demands within a few seconds. They rock.

However at times it seems they can be a curse. Check this sign out, from deep within Wales, where such critical things have to be translated into both English and Welsh.

Nothing untoward? Well perhaps not if you're the 99.9% (*) of readers of this site that can't read Welsh. However, chuck the Welsh into an online translator and see what you get. Well, actually, maybe not a lot, because the more famous ones don't seem to handle Welsh, but Intertran, for instance, does.

Bit I am being crookedly the office at this time. You send any time I w translate.

Erm, pardon? Well, there's evidence that machine translation isn't exactly at Star Trek levels yet. Nonetheless, an expert office worker could probably decipher that into the usual vague excuse for doing no work that an OOO message is. According to the BBC amongst others, what it really says is:

I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated

Yes, you can see what happened here. Some last-minute signwriter in Swansea council sent off the thrilling copy regarding goods vehicles to their translation team. The team happened to be away from the desk on some jollies or similar, so back came this out of office message (suspiciously only in Welsh, a little backward thinking for a translation team some might say). Well, that was quick service think the council whose proof readers know not a piece of Welsh, let's get that sign up right away. Which they do. Hahaha.

It seems its a something of a chronic problem over there in the Western part of mainland Britain. That BBC article lists a handful of other wild 'n' wacky Welsh-based sign errors. Other seem almost malicious, just like that oft-quoted "You can shoot a Welshman on a Tuesday" laws we all like to laugh and now and then.

....a sign for pedestrians in Cardiff reading 'Look Right' in English read 'Look Left' in Welsh.

Advocates of one or the other of those languages are clearly intended for road-kill sometime soon!

(*) Figure not entirely scientifically generated.