Translation bloopersgathered from a variety of sourcesbyGraham Davies
Contents
Translation bloopers gathered from a variety of sources by Graham Davies 1
Contents 1
Some apocryphal stuff 2
Online machine translators 2
Bah, bah, black sheep, translated with Babel Fish 2
Humpty Dumpty, translated with Babel Fish 2
Humpty Dumpty, translated with Google Translate 3
A business text, translated with Google Translate and Babel Fish 4
A journalistic text, translated with Google Translate and Babel Fish 4
Fun with machine translators 4
Cuckoo clock assembly instructions 5
A miscellany of mistranslations 5
From a hotel in Budapest, which has its own dental surgery 8
Instructions on a paella pan 8
Instructions on a lift in France 9
Sign in Arizona 10
From a pre-democratic report on journalism in East Germany 10
On a Hungarian menu 10
In a bathroom in a French hotel 10
Humorous translations 11
Fractured French 11
Sky my husband! 11
The Madonna Interview 11
Gerard Hoffnung 13
Speech recognition 13
Copyright 13
Some apocryphal stuff
The following examples have often been cited as mistakes made by machine translation (MT) systems. Whether they are real examples or not cannot be verified.
Russian-English: In a technical text that had been translated from Russian into English the term water sheep kept appearing. When the Russian source text was checked it was found that it was actually referring to a hydraulic ram.
Russian-English: Idioms are often a problem. It is claimed that the translation of the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak into Russian ended up as the vodka is strong but the meat is rotten – i.e. after translating the original into Russian and translating it back into English.
Russian-English: Another example, similar to the one above, is where out of sight, out of mind ended up being translated as the equivalent of blind and stupid.
All three of the above examples sound more like mistakes made by human beings – or they may just have been invented in order to highlight the shortcomings of MT systems. MT systems do, however, often make mistakes. The Systran MT system, which has been used by the European Commission, translated the English phrase pregnant women and children into des femmes et enfants enceints, which implies that both the women and the children are pregnant. Although it is an interpretation of the original phrase that is theoretically possible, it is also clearly wrong.
You can read more about MT systems in Section 3 of Module 3.5 at the ICT4LT website: http://www.ict4lt.org/en/en_mod3-5.htm#machinetrans
Online machine translators
Try using an online machine translator to translate a text from English into another language and then back again. The results are often amusing!
Bah, bah, black sheep, translated with Babel Fish
This is the result of translating Bah, bah, black sheep into French and then back again into English, using Babel Fish: http://uk.babelfish.yahoo.com/
English source text:
Bah, bah, black sheep, have you any wool? Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full. One for the master, one for the dame, and one for the little boy who lives down the lane.
French translation:
Bah, bah, mouton noir, vous ont n'importe quelles laines ? Oui monsieur, oui monsieur, trois sacs complètement. Un pour le maître, un pour dame, et un pour le petit garçon qui vit en bas de la ruelle.
And back into English again:
Bah, bah, black sheep, have you n' imports which wools? Yes Sir, yes Sir, three bags completely. For the Master, for lady, and for the little boy who lives in bottom of the lane.
Humpty Dumpty, translated with Babel Fish
This is the result of translating Humpty Dumpty into Italian and then back again into English, using Babel Fish: http://uk.babelfish.yahoo.com/
English source text:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.
Italian translation:
Humpty Dumpty si è seduto su una parete. Humpty Dumpty ha avuto una grande caduta. I cavalli di tutto il re e gli uomini di tutto il re non hanno potuto un Humpty ancora.
And back into English again:
Humpty Dumpty has been based on a wall. Humpty Dumpty has had a great fall. The horses of all the king and the men of all the king have not been able a Humpty still.
Humpty Dumpty, translated with Google Translate
This is the result of translating Humpty Dumpty into Italian and then back again into English, using Google Translate: http://translate.google.co.uk/
English source text:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.
Italian translation:
Humpty Dumpty sedeva su un muro. Humpty Dumpty ha avuto un grande caduta. Tutti i cavalli del re e tutti gli uomini del re non poteva mettere Humpty di nuovo insieme.
And back into English again:
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king's horses and all the king's men could not put Humpty together again.
Now, this is an interesting result! Google Translate used to be a very unreliable MT tool. It drives language teachers mad, as their students often use it to do their homework, e.g. translating from a given text into a foreign language or drafting their own compositions and then translating them. Mistakes made by Google Translate used to be very easy to spot, but Google changed its translation engine a few years ago and now uses a Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) approach. This requires the use of large bilingual corpora which serve as input for a statistical translation model. Essentially, Google Translate begins by examining and comparing massive corpora of texts on the Web that have already been translated by human beings. It looks for matches between source and target texts and uses complex statistical analysis routines to look for statistically significant patterns, i.e. it works out the rules of the interrelationships between source and target texts for itself. As more and more corpora are added to the Web this means that Google Translate will keep improving until it reaches a point where it will be very difficult to tell that a machine has done the translation. The Humpty Dumpty translation back into English from the Italian appears to indicate that Google Translate has matched the whole text and got it right. Clever!
See this YouTube video, Inside Google Translate: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GdSC1Z1Kzs
A business text, translated with Google Translate and Babel Fish
I used Google Translate to translate the following text from German into English:
Die Handelskammer in Saarbrücken hat uns Ihre Anschrift zur Verfügung gestellt. Wir sind ein mittelgroßes Fachgeschäft in Stuttgart, und wir spezialisieren uns auf den Verkauf von Personalcomputern.
This was rendered as:
The Chamber of Commerce in Saarbrücken has provided us your address is available. We are a medium sized shop in Stuttgart, and we specialize in sales of personal computers.
OK, not perfect, but it’s intelligible. Babel Fish gave me a better version:
The Chamber of Commerce in Saarbruecken put your address to us at the disposal. We are a medium sized specialist shop in Stuttgart, and we specialize in the sale of personal computers.
A journalistic text, translated with Google Translate and Babel Fish
Die deutsche Exportwirtschaft kämpft mit der weltweiten Konjunkturflaute und muss deshalb von den Zeiten zweistelligen Wachstums Abschied nehmen. [Ludolf Wartenberg vom Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie]
This was rendered by Google Translate as:
The German export economy is struggling with the global downturn and must therefore take the times of double-digit growth goodbye. [Ludolf Wartenberg from the Federation of German Industry]
Not perfect, but it’s intelligible, and better than the following version that Babel Fish gave me – which failed to recognise that Ludolf Wartenberg is a proper name:
The German export trade and industry fights with the world-wide recession and must take therefore from the times of two digit growth parting. [Ludolf waiting mountain of the Federal association of the German industry.]
Fun with machine translators
This is what happens when an English sentence is translated by computer into and from a sequence of different languages:
I typed:
Once upon a time there were three bears who lived in the middle of a deep, dark forest.
The result was:
It was, was not seriously three bears, that one had deeply lived in the average the one and sunk forest.
I typed:
Once upon a time there were three bears who lived in the middle of a deep, dark forest.
The result was:
There are three striking Woods, deep in the dark, he resided.
Cuckoo clock assembly instructions
Some years ago I bought my mother-in-law a cuckoo clock in Germany. She could not make sense of one of the English instructions for assembling and hanging the clock. One sentence read: Put the clock to the head. On reading the original German Stellen Sie die Uhr auf den Kopf, I was able to translate the sentence correctly as Turn the clock upside down.
A miscellany of mistranslations
I found the following examples at this website:
Bloopers: Company Translations:
http://www.oocities.org/area51/zone/7474/blco.html
I have added a few of my own that I have found on my travels in Europe.
In Taiwan, the translation of the Pepsi slogan Come alive with the Pepsi Generation came out in Chinese as Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the grave.
When Parker Pen marketed a ballpoint pen in Mexico, its ads were supposed to say It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you. However, the company mistakenly thought the Spanish word embarazar meant embarrass. Instead the ads said: It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant.
Chicken-man Frank Perdue's slogan sounds much more interesting in Spanish. It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken got terribly mangled in Spanish translation. A photo of Perdue with one of his birds appeared on billboards all over Mexico with a caption that explained: It takes a hard man to make a chicken aroused or It takes a sexually stimulated man to make a chicken affectionate.
Coors put its slogan, Turn it loose, into Spanish, where it was read as Suffer from diarrhoea.
Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux used the following in an American campaign: Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.
When Braniff translated a slogan touting its upholstery, Fly in leather, it came out in Spanish as Fly naked.
The Microsoft ad slogan, as translated into Japanese: If you don't know where you want to go, we'll make sure you get taken. (No wonder Macs are the best selling computer in Japan.)
Clairol introduced the Mist Stick, a hair curling iron, into German only to find out that Mist is slang for (to put it delicately) manure. Not too many people had use for the Manure Stick. This is the reason why Rolls Royce decided not to call one of its models the Silver Mist, for fear of lost sales in the German-speaking world.
When Chevrolet developed the Chevy Nova, they decided to market it heavily in Mexico, where the name translates as doesn't go. The car was later renamed Caribe.
Ford had a similar problem in Brazil when the Pinto flopped. The company found out that Pinto was Brazilian slang for tiny male genitals. Ford removed all the nameplates and substituted Corcel, which means horse.
The American slogan for Salem cigarettes, Salem – Feeling Free, was translated into the Japanese market as When smoking Salem, you will feel so refreshed that your mind seems to be free and empty.
The German advertising office of Wang computers came up with the unfortunate slogan Wang cares.
The name Coca-Cola in China was first rendered as something that when pronounced sounded like Coca-Cola: Ke-kou-ke-la. Unfortunately, the Coke company did not discover until after thousands of signs had been printed that the characters used meant bite the wax tadpole or female horse stuffed with wax, depending on the dialect. Coke then researched 40,000 Chinese characters and found a close phonetic equivalent, Ko-kou-ko-le, which can be loosely translated as happiness in the mouth.
Also in Chinese, the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan finger-lickin' good came out as eat your fingers off.
An American tee-shirt maker in Miami printed shirts for the Spanish market, promoting the Pope's visit. Instead of the desired I saw the Pope (el Papa) the shirts proclaimed in Spanish I saw the Potato (la Papa).
Hunt-Wesson introduced its Big John products in French Canada as Gros Jos before finding out that the phrase, in slang, means big breasts. In this case, however, the name problem did not have a noticeable effect on sales.
Colgate introduced a toothpaste in France called Cue, the name of a notorious porno magazine.
In Italy, a campaign for Schweppes Tonic Water translated the name into Schweppes Toilet Water.
Japan's second-largest tourist agency was mystified when it entered English-speaking markets and began receiving requests for unusual sex tours. Upon finding out why, the owners of Kinki Nippon Tourist Company changed its name.