Hospital appointment text in IRISH?

ScouseMouse

Hiya folks. Just got a text from a HSE eye clinic in Dublin but I thinks it stupid they send this - like this. My wife is irish, she is not sure, my 12 year old is doing irish in school and she is unsure.

Can somebody please unravel this. Many thanks

appointment on 11-M.Fomh-2015 at 15.30

I am assuming it is irish.

go raibh a maith agat

StonyIron

I'm all in favour of supporting Irish language usage but that kind of thing is unhelpful, annoying and a bit ridiculous and will result in missed dates and waste of very limited HSE resources.

Send it in both languages if you must, or send it in the normal international standard way of writing dates

11/09/2015 15:30

There's no need to write months out or days.

The purpose of the SMS is to inform you of an appointment, not give you a language lesson or demonstrate culture.

StonyIron

Mí Meán Fomhair is September

So your appointment is 11/09/15 at 15:30

ScouseMouse

Now I am even more confused. The child is standing here with an irish book "Iontal1"

11-M.Fomf-2015 at 15.30

What is M.Fomh at 15.30

I get the 15.30 is 3.30 pm

EDIT Crossover on previous post. Thanks very much. Its an eye test and I need somone to drive me as I will be blinded for a while.

Cheers

StonyIron

It's abbreviation in Irish for September

Your appointment is 11 September

StonyIron

I'm not talking about the OP here but many people attending a hospital have no Irish / limited Irish, may have reading difficulties due to vision or cognitive issues or may be non native English speakers.

Sending out an appointment message that's in abbreviated Irish with bits of English is completely stupid and could actually fall under disability discrimination rules / legislation.

I'm fed up with this use of bureaucracy or public information signs do push a single language agenda. Or, just making a total hash and using bits of both languages making it a totally unintelligible gobeldy gook that isn't translatable easily.

For example for a long time Dublin Bus had signs up on stops with all intermediate stop information in Irish only and with the rest of the info in English.

I speak reasonable Irish but the reality is that I do not know the names of places in Dublin in Irish because it's primarily an English speaking place. So basically I couldn't figure out where the stops were at all! Even googling the names didn't help as they're obscure gaelicisations in many cases.

Cork also managed to put up tourist signs on finger posts with Irish on one side and English on the other. The result is depending on which direction you're walking the sign is displaying only one or the other language!

End result: confusion. Tourists following sign for English Market ... Sign vanishes and next one says An Margadh Sasanach ... Tourist walks past looking for English Market sign.

You either use bilingual signs (both languages independently) or you don't.

You can't confusingly mix two languages together into a total nonsense in signage that just makes the signs unusable to anyone who isn't bilingual.

That's actually rendering them useless to an Irish speaker and to an English speaker!

Anyway - sorry about the rant but, I just think effort and money could go info much more useful and creative ways of promoting Irish than annoying people with poorly translated, insulting, tokenism like this.

Arbie

I use Irish as the default language on my laptop & phone. Some programs/apps which are in English send messages/invitations/meeting requests etc. in the default language automatically but I didn't know this until someone told me they had received a message with Irish dates. The clinic may be unaware that there is a problem so it would be good to let them know.

StonyIron

Could possibly explain it.

You should definitely say it to the administration though as they'll end up with a lot of potential missed appointments otherwise.

ScouseMouse

Thanks for the help folks. I am not interested in irish bashing, but with the way Ireland has gone so multi-cultural, it makes no sense at all except to be satisfy some rule somewhere. Even good old Google didnt decipher it.

Thanks again.

scousemouse

RainyDay

ScouseMouse wrote: »

Thanks for the help folks. I am not interested in irish bashing, but with the way Ireland has gone so multi-cultural, it makes no sense at all except to be satisfy some rule somewhere. Even good old Google didnt decipher it.

It doesn't satisfy any rules. The rules require bilingual communications.

StonyIron

ScouseMouse wrote: »

Thanks for the help folks. I am not interested in irish bashing, but with the way Ireland has gone so multi-cultural, it makes no sense at all except to be satisfy some rule somewhere. Even good old Google didnt decipher it.

Thanks again.

scousemouse

It's not Irish language bashing to expect clear communication from a hospital. They can send the texts properly bilingually without any issue.

You got a mishmash of two languages and odd abbreviations that you couldn't understand. That's bad communication in any language.

All they had to send was the date and time in normal numerical format DD/MM/YY

Badly implemented linguistic tokenism in official communications is very counterproductive. It's not helpful to promotion of the language at all really.

Gael Mire

StonyIron wrote: »

It's not Irish language bashing to expect clear communication from a hospital. They can send the texts properly bilingually without any issue.

You got a mishmash of two languages and odd abbreviations that you couldn't understand. That's bad communication in any language.

All they had to send was the date and time in normal numerical format DD/MM/YY

Badly implemented linguistic tokenism in official communications is very counterproductive. It's not helpful to promotion of the language at all really.

Its not to satisfy any rule, there are no rules for this kind of thing and even if there were, a numerical format would satisfy them anyway. It is almost certainly unintentional.

I'm all for bilingualism, and when it is done correctly it does not negatively impact on anyone. An important part of that is the delivery of information in the simplest and clearest way, even if the text was entirely in Irish, a numerical format would still be better.