Oslo, Norway – The designer of a Norway WWII monument in honor of the country’s resistance fighters blamed the misspellings contained in the said memorial to an English spell-checker and artistic expression.
The said WWII monument which is a commemoration of the Pelle Group, a local band of resistance fighters in the Second World War and is placed in the Aker Brygge area was met with criticisms when it was unveiled late November as it was full of typos.
The artist behind the WWII monument, Kirsten Kokkin, also the daughter of one of the group’s members, Sverre Kokkin, stated that the typos were the results of her using an English word processing program spell-checker, as reported by TheLocal.no Monday.
“I was working on the text in the U.S., and I didn’t have a Norwegian word-processing program. The text has been checked by three people other than me. So it was a mistake, but it can’t be changed after the event,” she reasoned out.
Nevertheless, she also added that some of the typos were made as artistic expressions.
“I didn’t want to use too many characters. … We shouldn’t forget that this is a work of art, an artistic retelling of a historic moment in time. It shouldn’t be thought of as a document,” she stated.
The WWII monument’s misspellings include the Swedish word for “community” – instead of “”fellesskap”, the WWII monument’s word only had one “s” – as well as the word pertaining to Oslo area – “Oslo-omradet” which in the WWII monument is without the “t”. There are also a number of missing or misplaced punctuation within the WWII monument’s text.