Tuesday, April 24, 2007

"Provide you delicate and considerate service"

So this morning at work I had to figure out how to ticket a reservation on Shanghai Airlines. (They're named for the city, not for a habit of doping strangers and pressing them into service on whaling ships. Not that I have any reason to think that they do any such thing. At least I've never heard of such a thing. And you'd think that would make the news, don't you? But I digress.)
So I had to figure out how to ticket them and we didn't have their number at work. So I went to my good friend Google and looked them up. That quickly led me to this page and what looked like the number to call them on. As you can see:
Shanghai Airlines reservation center formally stated the reservation hot line 8006208888 in 25Sep 1998. The service quality and service range was completely improved than the former one.
Now translations and foreign idiom are always fun and I'm sure that we sound funny when we try to translate over to Chinese too. What really caught my eye was point 4.
Reservation Center is 24 hours service system. Every specialized trained booking assistant will use gentle and patient words to provide you delicate and considerate service.
"Gentle and patient words"? "Delicate and considerate service"? I quickly shot off some emails to see if we could change our mission statement or our training methods. (See, they don't sound like they'd kidnap people, do they?) So I called the number to see how well they lived up to their standards. The number directs to an advertisment for "Ladies that want to talk to you! Call [some other number] to chat!"
Not quite the delicate service I was looking for...


1 comment:

carrster said...

hahahahahaha!! That is awesome! :)