7Days comes in a plastic bag today, the bag containing a colour brochure for 'The Royal Breeze. Private Golf & Ocean Estate', offering 88 Golf Chalets for sale.
It wouldn't have been a cheap exercise, the renders, photography, design, printing, advertising costs all add up.
So you'd think that whoever put it all together would have thought to say where the development is located. The nearest they get is a note on the resort map that tells us it's '45 minutes to Dubai'.
You might also think they would have taken the trouble to check the English.
No need to bother with such trivialities, obviously.
In difficult-to-read white on a silver background (I thought designers had learned not to do that years ago) it breathlessly tells us:
"Located at the 12th hole of the Middle East's only seaside golf course, you are only a few meters away from the sparkling Arabian Gulf while the picturesque lagoon right on your door steps, where your yacht rocks gently in the private marina. Address you shot, feel the breeze in your face and wave to your family, watching from the balcony of your potential home."
Getting it right isn't rocket science is it. If I have something to appear in Arabic I have it written and checked by Arabs.
So what is it? Arrogance? As in "I speak English as well as anyone". Incompetence? Don't give a damn?
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3 comments:
Good copywriters are hard to find. I work in an ad agency and find myself always correcting mistakes...after my copywriters have checked the copy! It's shameful really....
Ahh, but they are out there, if you read between the lines...
And yes, such fractured English is unforgivable. It screams incompetence, arrogance and parsimony, negating every dirham spent on the development, and the publicity. FalconCity of Wonders, anybody?
EoD
DS, I worked in ad agencies too, including here in Dubai, and I always checked anything in English before it left the agency. My Arabic colleagues did the same with anything Arabic. Simple really.
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