Dutch

[wellinghall]

Can anyone here write Dutch? I'm trying to send an email to a Dutch theatre about a booking, and they keep ignoring me; and I don't know whether this is because they can't understand my English, or because they ignore all emails on principle.

Comments

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

You might want to consider running what you've written in English through babel fish.
http://babelfish.yahoo.com/
U zou kunnen willen nadenken lopend welke you' ve die in het Engels door babelfish wordt geschreven.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I'll do that if necessary; but given the, er, interesting results I've had when putting foreign language posts through Babel Fish, I'm saving it for a last resort.

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

If the language is kept simple enough it should do OK. The problem with putting foreign language posts through is that they are probably use more complex language and terms than it can realistically cope with. But if you are writing it yourself you can keep everything very simple. Of course the acid test is to re-translate the results back into English. Doing that with my comment above shows that it wasn't simple enough for it. :-(

[miss-t-ide.livejournal.com]

Have you tried posting your request on linguaphiles?

[bunn.livejournal.com]

Honestly, I would phone them.

If you aren't sure if they can manage any English at all, then at least on the telephone you know that the person at the other end can hear you and you aren't disappearing into a spam filter, perhaps one set to eat anything not written in Dutch.

[muuranker.livejournal.com]

I am supposed to be able to ....


Geachte heer, mevrouw, [or heer if you know it's a man, or mevrouw if you know it's a woman, or their name if you know their name]

Kunt u mij zeggen als u niet Engels lezen. Mijn vriend kan vertalen voor ons.

[Write what you want to say in English here,]

Hoogachtend

Mr X

I find it very remarkable that someone in the Netherlands does not read English. The few people who I've met there who don't are recent immigrants. If you are trying to book into the National Wayang Kulit Theatre, this may be the case, but still unlikely - the recent migrants I've met with poor English tend to be muslims re-migrating from France.

Phoning them may be better, as you say.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

I've never met any Dutch person who couldn't speak very good English - when theentityformerlyknownasdeity and I went to Amsterdam for work, we couldn't MAKE them speak Dutch.

So they're probably just not that switched on. Call them.