A Translated Sign and a Safety Instruction
A local council in South Australia has installed a bilingual safety sign at a pool. The Turkish line reads: 'Dikkat: Havuz kenarında koşmayınız. Çocuklar yalnız bırakılmamalıdır.' An English line above reads: 'Caution: No running on the pool deck. Children must not be left unattended.' A Turkish-speaking resident emails to say the Turkish is 'wrong' and confusing. You are asked to review before the sign is reprinted. The council has budget for one reprint and wants no further changes after that. You have the email but no photo of the sign layout.
1. Is the Turkish actually wrong? Assess each sentence.
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Neither sentence is grammatically wrong. 'Koşmayınız' is a correct negative imperative with polite plural, and 'yalnız bırakılmamalıdır' is a correct passive necessitative meaning 'must not be left alone'. So the resident's claim that it is 'wrong' is probably about something else. Two plausible sources of confusion: first, register mismatch, since 'koşmayınız' is quite formal and the passive construction is dense, which can read as stiff or even unclear to a hurried reader. Second, the two sentences have different structures, one a direct prohibition addressed to the reader and one an impersonal obligation, which can make the second feel like it is addressed to someone else. Without seeing the layout I cannot check whether line breaks separate the sentences badly.
2. Given one reprint only, what would you recommend, and what would you need to confirm first?
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I would recommend simplifying without changing meaning: keep a clear prohibition for running and make the second sentence explicitly about supervising children, for example using a direct form such as 'Çocukları yalnız bırakmayınız.' This keeps the two sentences parallel, both addressed to the reader, which removes the sense that the second rule applies to someone else. Before committing, I would confirm two things: whether the sign's layout places the Turkish under the English in a way that invites word-by-word comparison, and whether the resident's complaint was about grammar or about layout. If the problem is layout, a reprint with better line breaks may matter more than rewording. Because only one reprint is funded, I would ask the resident what specifically confused them before finalising.