I'm not perfect, English isn't even my first language so I make a lot of spelling and grammatical errors when I write English. I'm only human, but at least I recognize and admit it.

That aside, CoS claim they are so able and they even say Scientology and Dianetic have this incredible study technique that makes them fluent in any language. Just imagine the powers of the Clears and OTs!!

I have to admit I'm not very impressed with any of the Scientologists I've met or anything they have produced.

On one of my usual wanderings on their main site www.scientology.org I noticed today they got a menu bar at the top where one can select between 11 languages. To my astonishment they manage to spell the Norwegian menu wrong!

What do you give me, one word in Norwegian and they spell it wrong!!! [actually I noticed this long time ago, but I thought I'd give them a little time to correct such an obvious error] Don't any Norwegian Scientologist visit the Norwegian website of their church, or aren't there any Norwegian scientologists left? If there are I guess they don't dare to report the errors. Is this your work Matthias Fosse?

The menu button says "Norske" but I suppose they mean "Norsk". In English this is the same, you might say:

1: "These clams are Norwegian."

and 2: "This is written in Norwegian."

But in Norwegian this is different. The two sentences would translate to:

1: "Disse muslingene er norske."

and 2: "Dette er skrevet paa norsk."

Putting "norske" in example 2 would mean something like "This is written in Norwegians" (but difficult to compare since "Norske" can mean "Norwegians" or something/someone (plural)) Anyway, the word they use is wrong whatever you translate into it.

Even my cheap spell checker translates "norsk" correctly.

This of course made me interested enough to follow the link and check the spelling there. Here are my comments for the clam page http://hvaer.scientologi.no/ :

A: At the top there is a search facility and on the title is "AA sinne" (double A represent here the Norwegian/Danish letter A with a ring over). This means "To anger". Hard to figure out what they mean, but looking at the Danish translation of this page they use the Danish word for "Search". In Norwegian the word would be "Soek" (where oe is the Norwegian letter O with a slash). This is even more stupid than the error on the front page, not even possible to understand with a little goodwill.

B: Then there is the button for the search utility, this says "AA GAA" (again, double AA...). This means "To go"

and again it is not just wrong but incredible stupid. On the Danish page they haven't even bothered to translate it from the English "Go". The correct Norwegian word would have been "Finn". Again an incredible incompetent translation. And all these 3 are the first people see!

C: In the left pane menu they translate "Scientology's" to "Scientologis". I would say the correct spelling would be "Scientologiens", but they probably have some weird policy on how "Scientology" is translated for all I know. Or they should think sentences instead of translating word by word. Eg. "The strength of Scientology" should be translated "Scientologiens styrke" or "Styrken i Scientologien" and not "Styrken i Scientologi". Writing "Scientologis effektivitet", "Tjenester i Scientologi", "Statistikker og vekst i Scientologi" and "Scientologis prinsipper og anvendelse" like they do on their front page just sounds corny.

D: They capitalize the translation for "Scientology", but we don't use capitalization that way in Norwegian. While you write "Christianity" and "English" we write "scientologi"

and "engelsk". We only capitalize proper names so the translation of CoS should be capitalized: "Scientologikirken"

E: "Det er hevet over tvil" should be "Det er hevet over enhver tvil". Someone must help me on the question if this should be "en hver" insted of "enhver" (I believe it should be the first. Funny claim though.

F: They talk about "this book", but forget to write which book they are talking about... ("Denne boken ble første gang [...]") G: They capitalize the word "i" (like in English) but this is a different word in Norwegian, meaning "in". And of course it is not supposed to be capitalized.

H: They write "For aa gi en forstaaelse av dette fenomenet, inneholder denne boken en komplett beskrivelse av Scientologi - dens religioese filosofi, dens praksiser og dens oekende innflytelse i samfunnet." which is IMHO a word by word translation from English and again sounds corny. I would write "For aa gi en forstaaelse av dette fenomenet inneholder denne boken en komplett beskrivelse av scientologien, dens religioese filosofi, dens praksis og dens oekende innflytelse i samfunnet." (not considering the claims made here of course).

I: "Dianetikks" should be "Dianetikkens".

J: "Scientologi sekspansjon" is obviousely a spelling error, they probably mean "Scientologis ekspansjon". But then again that should have been "Scientologiens ekspansjon".

There is no word called "sekspansjon".

K: "varemerke informasjon" should be joined into one word, like they correctly have typed "Suksesshistorier".

That's what I found on the front page, and I'm not an expert in Norwegian gramma (it's just my first language, which hopefully counts for something) so there might be more. What it proves to me is that Scientologists (again) fail utterly even when they try their best. I hope at least my English is better than their Norwegian, not that it would be difficult... I even notice errors on their English main page.

The following are comments for the page:

http://hvaer.scientologi.no/Html/part14/chp42/index.html A: They've used the graphic from the English page as the first letter, making it a "C". It should be an "S" for the Norwegian text.

B: Again they capitalize by error "Scientologikirker". That's plural and not a proper name.

C: "Scientologis" should be "scientologiens" (this error is all over the site so I'll stop mentioning it from now on).

D: The telephone number to IAS lacks UK prefix. If they write it in Norwegian I assume they mainly address Norwegians in Norway so it would be logical to add. Later they have a US number and add the following comment "if you call from inside USA".

Why not just write the correct prefix? Critics manage this all the time on their pages.

E: They refer to page numbers like "732" and "749" "in this summary" on a tiny web page. Obviously just a transcript.

Are they so focused on word clearing they don't see what they write?

F: On the page about RTC they write "the", but since this is an English word it should be either be capitalized as part of a name or omitted.

G: I believe "Samveldet av uavhengige stater" should be "Samveldelandene" ("the Commonwealth countries"), but I'm not 100 % sure about this.

H: All addresses should have the country code before the post number (zip code). Hey, I've worked in the postal services for 10 years, had to comment on it. ;) I: Isn't flagserviceorg@earthlink.net an old address for Flag?

J: They translate "applied religious technology" with "anvendt religiøs filosofi", but wouldn't it be more correct to translate it to "maalrettet religiøs filosofi"? Again, I'm only focusing on the translation here and not the actual message in the text.

Now I can't take much more. The claims are one thing, they get wilder and wilder and it is hard not to comment on them. But many of the sentences are also very poor, too much to go through all of them here. And no point I guess, I believe I got the message through. I've just commented on very few pages here, compared to all they have in Norwegian. Imagine the state of the rest.

Someone is going to the RPF for this...

CC: webmaster@scientology.org and webmaster@scientology.no Remember, I'm one of the good guys. :) Best wishes,
Andreas Heldal-Lund, Nunsteinvegen 9, N-4056 Tananger, Norway
Pho: +47 90 04 32 99 Fax: 90 32 35 46 E-mail: ahl@xenu.net
home.sol.no/~spirous www.xenu.net www.hedning.no/hedning
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"If anyone can show me, and prove to me, that I am wrong in
thought or deed, I will gladly change. I seek the truth, which
never yet hurt anybody. It is only persistence in self-delusion
and ignorance which does harm." -- Marcus Aurelius
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