There are times when, as an English speaker, you visit a winery in a non-Anglophone country and see that they’ve made some effort to have their brochures or wine labels in English. This can be an initially joyful experience until you actually read said materials and are left scratching your head as to what they’re trying to get at. In the worst case scenarios, you may even need to cover the eyes of your children due to the unintentional, yet very explicit pornographic content created by various wine descriptions.
There are those who get that Google Translate does not a proper English outreach campaign make. Even if they speak English decently/fluently, they realize that the only way to get something to sound the way it does in its original language is to pay a native speaker to make sure of it. Of course, this can be expensive which is why many decide to forgo this rather important step.
Lord knows that when speaking (poorly) in one of several languages that I’ve (somewhat) learned over the years I make no end of mistakes. Hell, even writing casually in English, I make mistakes. But, if I needed to put a label on a product or send out something to the public, especially around the world, I’d be damned sure that the English is solid, so solid it hurts.
So, it’s about time to showcase some wineries and wines that have decided that their English language outreach can be “ass-halved”, while at the same time, tossing in others that do get it and went that extra kilometer to correctly translate the original source language properly.
Shall we begin? Forward we walk to the primary English marriage!
Note that all names and brands have been hidden to protect the… hmm… “innocent”.
