My name is Steve Dodson I’m a retired copyeditor currently living in western Massachusetts after many years in New York City. A Welsh txtspk dictionary was published, but I doubt that much of it was ever adopted.Īnd best of all, the Welsh word “lol” actually means “nonsense” which is rather apt in this case.Ĭommented-On Language Hat Posts (courtesy of J.C. Most Welsh speakers do use some sort of Welsh text speak, but this often consists of using “tn” for “are you”/”you are” and “vn” for “I am”, along with some more removal of vowels, rather than any contrived translations of LOL, etc. There have been several discussions a while back on the Welsh language message board about possibilties for LOL, ROFL etc but they never seemed to reach a satisfying conclusion. None of them are actually in use as far as I know. The bad translations were removed, and the “corrections” put in their place. Somebody must have told the PR company of their blunder, so they then found somebody who actually spoke Welsh to have a look at them. It was meant to be “LMAO”, but actually has a meaning(ish) similar to “Laugh My Rib Off”, which actually seemed to make sense in a roundabout way. Some of the original “translations” can be seen on this BBC blog that highlighted them in the first place. The PR company that wrote the article had initially used a machine translation website (like the dreaded Intertran) to translate the English to Welsh…with unintentionally hilarious consequences (which we are only too aware of, although the joke wears rather thin after the umpteenth mistranslation).

Ha! This was doing the rounds on Twitter last week.

Text speek bth