For the national broadcaster, it was a move into new territory - Polish and Chinese being spoken to a multicultural audience in a prime time TV slot. Or was it?
For weeks RTÉ has been broadcasting a clever ad warning viewers to pay their TV licence fee. In it, an inspector pays a visit to a licence-less apartment to find three (Irish-looking, Irish-accented) students in front of the box. Their excuse? "No English - I'm Polish," says the first man. "I'm Chinese - not a word of English," says the girl. "I'm from Barbados," says the third.
Alas, the three are foiled by the inspector's linguistic range - he responds in English for the man from Barbados, and then in what we presume is Polish and Chinese for the others. Meanwhile, the English subtitle gives us the words, unpoetic in any language, "Non-payment can mean a heavy fine."
"We've heard all the excuses," adds a voiceover.
But all was not as it seemed, according to Magda, a Dundalk-based Polish architect who contacted the Ray D'Arcy Show on Today FM yesterday. "I am Polish and I can say for sure he is not speaking the Polish language," she said of the inspector.
"I don't understand a word. Neither do any of my Polish friends.
"With so many Polish people in the country, did the ad makers think they could get away with this? Was it too difficult to get someone to translate it properly?"
A spokeswoman for RTÉ said Cawley Nea, the company that made the "Excuses - Students" ad, engaged an independent translation service agency called Wordperfect to translate the sentence.
"As the exact translation of the text was too long to try and communicate in subtitles and in the script, an accurate, abbreviated version was supplied by the translation service," the spokeswoman continued.
"The Irish actor playing the licence inspector, who is not a native Polish or Chinese speaker, was then supplied with a phonetic version of the sentence to learn. To further help the actor with his pronunciation, a native Polish speaker [ from Wordperfect] was recorded reading the line over five times so the actor could learn the line by ear. The same process was followed for the Chinese sentence.
"While it may be true that the actor may not have sounded like a native speaker, every effort was made to ensure that translation and pronunciation of the Polish and Chinese sentences were as accurate as possible."
Olga Gashi of Wordperfect said it stood over the translation it provided to RTÉ via Cawley Nea and suggested it was RTÉ that had "abbreviated" the text.
Of course, RTÉ could have said the inspector's poor Polish was part of the joke - albeit a private one for our Polish friends.
Or it could have said the error was part of an elaborate publicity stunt. But then again, we've heard all the excuses.
