My Worst Typo of the Year

It's time to poke some fun at ourselves! While we are both usually hyper-aware of grammar and spelling in our four languages, we, just like the Sunday New York Times, make mistakes. Unfortunately, my recent one has embarrassed me so much that I've literally lost sleep over it.

As a board member of the newly formed Nevada Translators and Interpreters Association (NITA), I am trying to increase our membership. We wanted to include sign-language interpreters, so I sent an e-mail to all the sign-language interpreters in our state registered with their professional organization. My goal was to invite them to join our organization. Unfortunately, in my e-mail, I wrote "Interpreters for the death" instead of "Interpreters for the deaf". Trust me, I am cringing as I type this.

However, several members were gracious enough to respond to my awful e-mail anyway -- but of course pointed out my horrendous mistake, to which I responded with heartfelt apologies. I am happy to report NITA now has a few new members; and I better watch what my fingers do on the keyboard these days!


2 comments:

Narrative Threads on December 29, 2008 at 3:35 PM said...

I hear your pain, but I can't help but imagine what a challenge interpreting for the dead would be. Would this be the PC term for psychics?

Judy Jenner and Dagmar Jenner on December 30, 2008 at 4:02 PM said...

@Wanderjenn: Good point about this perhaps being an adequate term for psychics; I hadn't even thought about that!

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The entrepreneurial linguists and translating twins blog about the business of translation from Las Vegas and Vienna.

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