Where does the phrase Mind the Gap come from?
The phrase is a recorded message heard on the London Underground to warn passengers of the gap between the train and the platform.
Because some platforms on the London Underground are curved, and the train carriages are straight, an unsafe gap is created when the train stops at a curved platform.
The phrase “Mind the gap” was coined in around 1968 when the announcement was automated, after it had become impractical for drivers and station attendants to warn every passenger in person.
During the coronation weekend of King Charles III in 2023, the message was voiced by the King himself and his wife Camilla.
It was played throughout every railway station in the United Kingdom.
Why call the blog Mind the Gap?
Just as a wide gap between the train and the platform increases the risk for passengers boarding the tube, a wide standards gap between their English content and their business standards can increase the risks for tourism businesses welcoming English-speaking visitors.
What causes the gap?
Situations happen which can result in the widening of the standards gap, such as the misuse of machine translation, translated content evolving over time, or content being hurriedly written in-house, or written by non-native speakers.
Recently I have seen a lot of English content that has been translated by machine translation, which introduces errors, omissions, and hallucinations into the text whilst sounding impressively fluent to a non-native speaker. This significantly increases business risk if it is not reviewed and corrected by a human translator.
Solutions to minimise the gap
My mission at Ideal Words is to provide solutions to help German-speaking tourism businesses minimise the standards gap.
An English content quality review is the first step to discovering whether your existing content has a standards gap.
It may be that not all your translated English content is the same standard, in which case the gap can be minimised by reworking the content with the widest gaps.
Your English content could just need a refresh to get it up-to-date, or it may be more effective to translate from scratch or copywrite new English content to ensure it achieves your objectives.
