Liesl Barrell

We discovered something strange at HTC the other day. There was some Swedish character encoding lurking in our system.

Sweden's number 2 export: body paint. Number 1: thumbs ups.

I for one think the Swedes are commendable for their efforts to fight the inevitable extinction of natural blondes. If we were to map the human genome on an actual map of the world, Sweden would presumably be one big dollop of topographical recessiveness.

Maybe I have a soft spot for the country because a close friend from my time in Ethiopia was half Swedish. She taught me a little, though now I can only remember “Jag måste pinka” (I need to pee) and “Ost” (cheese). Admittedly, that is all I would ever need to survive for months on end in Sweden itself, but I felt the need to learn a little more… Maybe it would make me feel more connected to whatever mystery developer of years past left those telltale Swedish imprints in our code.

So I decided to look up “fail,” which according to Google Translate is most likely “misslyckas” (which is funny enough as it sounds: I wonder if they have a misslyckas blog?) but my hands-down favourite of the supposedly 22 different translations for “fail” is definitely “GÖRA FIASKO.”

Any culture that has 22 different ways to fail must try awfully hard.

Tags: Career, Computers, Content Management Systems, Expats, Global Village, Language, TCK, Third Culture Kids, Translation, Web Development

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