Following Andrea Leadsom’s withdrawal from the leadership race, it was announced yesterday that Theresa May will take over from David Cameron as PM later this week. The news was soon trending on Twitter, with Brits across the country documenting their reactions.
Amidst the ranting, raving and jokes lay one subtle spelling error that caused a stir: Teresa May (without the ‘h’) actually refers to a UK Glamour Model, not the next Prime Minister. It is evident that Teresa uses Twitter as a marketing tool to good effect; as such, we hope that the added publicity was positive rather than negative. Nevertheless, it must have quite bemusing to suddenly find yourself involved in such a public discussion! We noticed this morning that Theresa (with an ‘h’) had now taken over as a trending topic; it seems that the general public did eventually check their spelling.
Amusement aside, this is a lesson for the Twittersphere. Some people pointed to this blunder as being indicative of the general population’s level of engagement with politics. We think it demonstrates how important proofreading is! You might think that written mistakes are all caught by a word processor spellcheck. This simply isn’t the case; misspellings and strange grammatical constructs are not the only things to watch out for. Has your typo produced an incorrect – but still legitimately spelt – word or phrase? Have you marked a noun as a proper noun, used consistent conventions for capital letters, hyphens and number formatting? Did you use a colon where a semi-colon would do? Has your political rant unintentionally been directed towards a member of the adult entertainment industry? A second opinion never hurts…
At Web-Translations we include proofreading as standard on translation quotations. A fresh pair of eyes catches any small imperfections and ensures that your text fulfils its objectives.
12 July 2016 08:37