I was (briefly) gutted today to receive a four star review for the handspun yarn above. In the 15 years I have been selling on Etsy (1,657 sales to date) I have never before had fewer than the full five stars. (Well, there was one occasion when a buyer awarded me three because she couldn’t fasten her item. She withdrew the low review when I showed her where the buttons were neatly concealed!)
The buyer of the yarn above was very sweet. She praised the wool as ‘very pretty’ and mentioned fast delivery etc But she was disappointed that the colours looked different. I don’t usually have a problem getting accurate photos of those particular colours (some purple/blues are quite a different matter…) and I had clearly taken several pictures on different days, from batt to skein, before and after setting the twist…so there is not a lot more I can do about how they look on different monitors.
The reason I mention this here, though, is because of the online translation. My buyer is French (with a lovely Etsy name involving sheep). The relevant part of her review states that ‘les couleurs sont assez différentes de la photo’. It just so happens that I speak French – and in any case that sentence is hardly complicated. It has been translated by Etsy (Google?) as ‘the colours are quite different from the photo’. NOT correct. ‘Assez’ often does carry the meaning of ‘quite’ – but here it should have been rendered as ‘rather’ or ‘somewhat’ different, NOT ‘quite different’ = ‘totally different’, which is QUITE DIFFERENT and not QUITE FAIR!
I wonder how often I encounter this online in languages I don’t know and so have no chance of spotting it.
PS. I am well over fretting about the lost star! In the scale of things it doesn’t make a scrap of difference and it wasn’t really anything in my control. I shall treat the incident as character building, and a warning not to get complacent!
SpinningStreak 