Promoting Andalucía (while Cocking it Up)

[lenox]

The Junta de Andalucía has created a new web-page with the help of Telefonica and at a cost of 5,400,000 euros to promote the region, according to El Mundo. It's at http://www.andalucia.org. Very informative and, at less than the equivalent of a billion pesetas, remarkably good value. It's even got a section in, uh, Engrish as she is writted.
Here's a taste:
'There are still very few who, in a illustrated and planned form, come to Andalucia to enjoy the flamenco tourism. It is our intention that those who wish to know flamenco in Andalucia by tourism, find in this site, ordered and varied references that help you know by a incipient form, of the great cultural and festive treasure, that flamenco supposes'.
I personally prefer this site, http://www.andalucia.com and can't help but wonder how much it cost?????

[Beachcomber]

You would have thought they could have afforded a proper translator instead of using an online one!

[katy]

A.Com is far superior. It will be someone in the junta's son instead of putting the contract out for tender according to European rules! It is common knowledge the spanish are at websites when you use them. Even the third world does them better.

Apart from the stilted language there isn't much new either, not moved on since the 70's

[knowal]

So, let's add this up
domain name €20 for 2 years.
Hosting at unlimited bandwidth - Maybe €500 per year?
A couple of webmasters with some decent software €60,000 a year
2 clerks to collate information - €24,000 a year

Oh - English translator - €4.55

Total 5.4 million euros?
How the heck did they spend that sort of money?

[.Griff.]

Hosting at unlimited bandwidth - Maybe €500 per year?

lol.. Not quite..

[knowal]

lol.. What's your intelligent estimate, then?

[.Griff.]

My crystal ball is on the dishwasher so I've no idea how many visitors they attract, size and/or number of databases they use let alone bandwidth.

However I can tell you that one of my modest websites/forums* is currently costing circa £750 a month in hosting fee's so I'm guessing theirs is going to be slightly more than 500 euros a year.



(* - Modified vB CMS/Forum Threads 480,464, Posts 6,686,789, Members 41,085)

[knowal]

Nowhere near spending €5,000,000 then Griff?


I did find unlimited bandwidth web hosting on a dedicated server for about £2,000 in the UK so I admit I was a bit low in my estimate.

The public have been ripped off, I think lenox has made his point!

[Beachcomber]

...The public have been ripped off, ...

What??? By the Junta de Andalucía... never.

[markwilding]

This is a typical problem with Spanish translations into English. I understand a very small business not checking with a native English speaker before they publish something in English. A good example of this is a local restaurant offering 'meat and two veg' as 'combinated plate'
However, why a big budget project can't check at least with a profesional translator is beyond me. It looks like all this person has done is looked up in a dictionary for the words he didn't know, picking the first one in the list, and then has written them word for word how the sentence would be constructed in Spanish, which would indicate quite a low level or at least no more than an intermediate level, which is nowhere near good enough to do this type of work.
It has already been said that the the project has probably been done by the Mayor's son. It also looks like to save money the English part has been done by the son as well with a little bit of help from his 16 year old grandson

[chrissiehope]

Has anyone noticed the awful English in the new Terminal at Malaga airport....?

[julian]

yes, but not all the English are awful, only some of them.

[chrissiehope]

[Jool]

Is there no external auditing of Regional authority accounts in Spain? Or quality control as this is the face of a significant region of Spain to the outside world and it is laughably amateur? A really excellent website could have been achieved for 20000 euros, to make it 5 million is simply unbelievable (are we really sure that all this money was spent just on the website and is not allocated for other marketing activities as well?)

[Jool]

Perhaps Sir P will do Andalucia next, then Spain, then the EU......then we would be crisis free and perhaps more business like...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... lions.html

[country boy]

I just don't understand the attitude in Spain. Is it loss of face? Surely, you don't even need a translator, just give it to a "Native Speaker" and ask if it makes sense! Native Speakers for any European tongue are not exactly thin on the ground down here !!

[markwilding]

The problem is when a Spaniard reads it, he probably doesn't see anything wrong. However, change it so it reads fine and he'll not understand it.

[julian]

maybe they looked at this forum and saw some of our spelling and decided it was best not to ask a "native speaker" to check it... even the spelling police here can´t spell !!!

[katy]

Maybe complain to Brussels, they appear to have funded it

See it is in Japanese and chinese, wonder how they read to nationals

[knowal]

To the Japanese it says:

You here in Andalucia welcome far eastern strangers bombed Hawaii you wanted like saw geisha girl making flamenco dancers adams apple.