Sunday, April 18, 2010

Policía Gramatical

Elieen reminded me with her most recent post that I've been meaning to post this picture for awhile. I'm used to seeing glaring English grammar mistakes all over Chile, but I wasn't expecting to find a Spanish grammar mistake in such a public place!

So it's tax time in Chile, where you go online and click a few buttons and voila, your taxes are done for you. It's great and I really think the US should jump on this bandwagon. There is no reason for taxes to be so difficult as they are in the US. But I digress.

So in some metro cars there are ads for you to get your taxes done early so you can get your money earlier. One of the signs looked like this:

Can you spot the mistake?

Well, what it's trying to say is "Ask to have your tax return deposited in:" (not pictured are the places you can have it deposited). What it actually says is: "Ask to have YOU tax return deposited in:"

You see, in Spanish, the word for "you" has an accent: tú. The word for "your" is the same word, but without the accent: tu.

Also unanswered is why they decided to use a stork to represent tax returns. I thought storks were supposed to deliver babies. Is getting a tax return like having a baby?

Anyway, it surprised me to see such a glaring mistake in such a public place. Although maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised, considering the Chilean mint printed a bunch of 50 peso coins with "CHIIE" instead of "CHILE". Perhaps they demoted the guy who made that mistake to the tax department...

3 comments:

Marmo said...

It´s a shame. We also abuse the use of " in many places where it doesn´t belong, like "Oferta" , or "Importante", instead of using underlines _ .
The same guy who spelled "Tú" instead of "tu" (I´m using " as pointing what someone else said) maybe decided the stork was a good choice for represent mail/electronic delivery.

Leigh said...

I've seen this sign, and it drives me nuts. It's the national treasury; I'm sure they had the resources to hire an editor.

Eileen said...

I'm willing to bet the guy wrote it properly and some pituto-weilding boss type person put in the tilde afterwards, thinking, this peon always gets this stuff wrong.

But still, couldn't they have had it proofread?!