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"We're back and..."

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Raymond sent me an email yesterday asking me to confirm an old Lan Manager slogan.

Back in the Lanman 2.0 days, Brian Valentine (who ran the Lanman group) made up a series of T-Shirts for the team with the words:

Lan Manager... We're back and we're BAD". 

I believe I still have one of those t-shirts.  It had a relatively snarky attitude, which I love (and why I loved working for Brian, he shared many of the same sentiments).  For the non-english speakers reading this, the use of "BAD" is an American idiom that means "nasty, in a really good way".

 

The reason that Raymond asked me the question was because of what apparently happened to the T-Shirt when it hit our international subsidiaries.  Not surprisingly, many of them wanted to print up their own version, but sometimes the results were... less than perfect.  According to one person, the Swedish had a hard time translating the "BAD" idiom.  So they apparently fell back on a literal translation of the slogan and printed up their own t-shirts, which said (translated back to english):

Lan Manager...  We are here again and we're not very good.

And now you know "The rest of the story(tm)"

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2008
    Truth in advertising?

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 20, 2008
    Internationalization issues are sometimes more tricky than technical one ;-) Alex Danvy, a French developer.

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2008
    I know regular readers have been waiting impatiently with the next post to the series after How many

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2008
    Sometimes, Alex? :-)

  • Anonymous
    February 21, 2008
    I know regular readers have been waiting impatiently with the next post to the series after How many

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2008
    I know regular readers have been waiting impatiently with the next post to the series after How many

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2008
    Seems the blog bots are waiting too... :P

  • Anonymous
    March 09, 2008
    I'm bot... I'm back and I'm BAD :)

  • Anonymous
    March 13, 2008
    "According to one person, the Swedish had a hard time translating the "BAD" idiom.  So they apparently fell back on a literal translation of the slogan and printed up their own t-shirts, which said (translated back to english): Lan Manager...  We are here again and we're not very good." Don't the Swedes have an expression like sjukgrymt (literally Sick Cruel) for this concept? Maybe that's a Stockholm hipster term that most people either won't get or would be annoyed by though. Mind you I've met some rabidly anti Microsoft Swedes, so maybe the mistake is deliberate.

  • Anonymous
    March 31, 2008
    "Sjukgrymt" sounds a little bit funny to a Swede; although I understand it well, it might probably sound better if you just simply said "grymt" (cruel). A more recent term is probably to prefix it with "fet" (fat). "Fetgrymt" would be a very contemporary term. :)

  • Anonymous
    April 01, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2008
    Translations are tricky, here is a small project I did for fun: http://railean.net/index.php/2008/02/25/russian_translation_challenge

  • Anonymous
    April 10, 2008
    "For the non-english speakers reading this..." :)