I’ll never forget the time I took the Frecciarossa from Santa Maria Novella to Napoli Centrale. On time, clean and complete with the complimentary drink and snack, my journey south was going by the book until I went to the loo—and was confronted by the ‘handdriver.’ I was simultaneously amused, confused and bothered. No editor should have to deal with a typo of that magnitude in a confined space hurtling down the country at 350 km/h.
Not that this episode should have surprised me, of course. A regular regionale rail commuter, I’m accustomed to ‘suppressed’ trains, notices about how to evacuate from galleries (not tunnels) and orders from train officials to ‘obliterate’ your ticket.
Linguistic faux pas are not committed on the trains alone. In 2002, the Italian ministry for education, universities and research hit international headlines with an infamous translation gaffe. A research project titled ‘Dalla pecora al pecorino: tracciabilità di filiera nel settore lattiero caseario toscano’ was rather explicitly rendered as ‘From sheep to Doggy Style,’ curdling the whole milk chain.
More recently, Expo Milano 2015 has provided food for thought in its litany of curious communications: a map highlighting Emilia-Romagna in the Tuscany pavilion and a dearth of English interpreting in the run-up to the World’s Fair. Bizarre translations run rife on the Expo website, with headlines such as ‘Region that go, project that you can find,’ and the claim that children can ‘ride on giant fruit and smell fragrant bells.’
But let me return to the ‘handdriver.’ What I didn’t understand was the provenance of the mistake. However much I longed to wash my hands of the incident, I spent the next 24 hours racking my brain for an explanation. Only when I returned to the office did my colleague come up with a practical solution: that someone had written the words ‘hand dryer’ on a piece of paper and left the graphic designer alone to work, who had deconstructed the ‘y’ as an ‘i’ and a ‘v’. At last, some sense in the proverbial nonsense.
