Welcome TO another blog!

When I walk around Brussels, I often notice incorrect signs and announcements in English, in places such as conference centres, museums, shops and cafés. In fact, sometimes even French-Dutch translations are not great (yes, in Belgium!), but that’s another story.

So I thought it might be useful for English language learners to be aware of some of these mistakes, so that you don’t learn them and then use them incorrectly yourself too.

Often it’s a problem with prepositions, such as in the following three sentences:

• Welcome in our conference centre

This is a very common mistake. The correct phrase is welcome to…! There is never a time when you would say "welcome in..."

• See you soon in our new address

See you soon at our new address.

• To sale

It’s always for sale!

However, sometimes, it seems it’s simply a case of not checking that translations make sense or sound right in translation. For example:

• We love to make bakery

I saw this in a café window, and I’m not exactly sure what they mean, because there is both a meaning and a grammatical error in the sentence. But to be brief: given that a bakery is the place where cakes and bread are made and sold, they probably don’t mean that they love to make bakeries, unless they literally make models of bakery shops out of cake or marzipan. Maybe they mean ‘we love to make cakes’ or ‘we love to make bread’.

• We make killer salads.

There are instances where you can use ‘killer’ in a very informal/slang way to mean ‘fantastic’ or ‘amazing’. However, given that ‘killer’ is more often used to mean something that causes death, it’s not really a good advertisement for food items. A killer salad? I think I might choose another café for my salad, thanks.

Don’t get me wrong, to err is human and I make mistakes in other languages all the time. But I’m a language learner. Language learners make mistakes and that’s great, because if we didn’t make mistakes, we wouldn’t be able to learn.

However, businesses don’t really have an excuse. I always wonder why they don’t just ask a native speaker to check the language before printing? The most damaging thing about this is that it’s easy for non-native speakers to then pick up incorrect language and assume it’s correct. Sometimes language evolves as a result of this, and that can be OK, but…often the mistakes are fundamental, and if you used them anywhere else in the world, they would just sound wrong and potentially lead to misunderstanding. Then, Brussels Bubble English just becomes confusing and irrelevant.

What do you think? Have you noticed any English language mistakes in Brussels or other places? If so, I’d love to hear from you!