| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4] | Poll: What's the most memorable translation mistake you've seen? Thread poster: ProZ.com Staff
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Lingua 5B wrote:
When I worked at UN, employees spoke English with varied degrees of proficiency.
One day a colleague came in laughing because somebody from another office approached him and said: “I was finding you, there is no you”.
I can picture how your colleague was trying very hard to explain his/her situation in trying to locate you, and s/he was using all the English words s/he knew to express one's feelings.
| | | | | Jap-Eng gone horribly wrong | Feb 10 |
I'll share two mistranslations which I encountered in my earlier days of my career.
There were two, both source sentences in Japanese translated into English for describing services offered at a hotel.
1) Please feel free to use our carriage service, since we are proud that we have not had any miscarriages.
2) Please feel free to take advantage of our chambermaids.
The first sentence was supposed to appeal to the guests at the hotel to not worry about... See more I'll share two mistranslations which I encountered in my earlier days of my career.
There were two, both source sentences in Japanese translated into English for describing services offered at a hotel.
1) Please feel free to use our carriage service, since we are proud that we have not had any miscarriages.
2) Please feel free to take advantage of our chambermaids.
The first sentence was supposed to appeal to the guests at the hotel to not worry about having accidents riding in the horse-driven carriages since there haven't been a single one from the day they started this service.
As to the second sentence, I couldn't stop laughing when I first saw this translation, and I assume people reading this would understand what the source text intended to say. ▲ Collapse
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I have seen and forgotten a lot of mistakes, so they were obviously not that memorable.
However, in my early days of proofreading, I was presented with a menu that took me a long time to puzzle out. It was written by the client, so there was no source text, only the English I was supposed to check.
There were some common spelling mistakes, and some dishes in recognisable French, which looked OK to me, but one of the desserts was ice cream, caramel crisp and raspberry co... See more I have seen and forgotten a lot of mistakes, so they were obviously not that memorable.
However, in my early days of proofreading, I was presented with a menu that took me a long time to puzzle out. It was written by the client, so there was no source text, only the English I was supposed to check.
There were some common spelling mistakes, and some dishes in recognisable French, which looked OK to me, but one of the desserts was ice cream, caramel crisp and raspberry couilles. I called the client and asked what they meant, but the first person did not know, and the next insisted it was perfectly normal French, everyone served it ...
After much searching, back when the Net was not what it is today, I found out what couilles actually meant. Nuts might fit in English - but raspberry??? I had to deliver my proof with a comment that the client should NOT, repeat NOT, write couilles, but I did not know what it should be.
Some days later I woke up in the middle of the night with the answer - of course, it should have been raspberry coulis. ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Can't see how this could have arisen | Feb 11 |
Tom in London wrote:
She's Russian and her command of English is not secure.
She wrote "I hope you've all been threatening yourselves during the holidays"
There's no way this can connect to anything a Russian could conceive in her mind that would be relevant in such a context. Prithee sire, what did she really mean by this? I know the ways of Runglish in and out, and still I can't figure out what it was. Maybe training? But training is so much easier to say for a Russian than threatening, and the only Russian word that readily connects to threatening is certainly out of the equation here
[Редактировалось 2024-02-12 11:32 GMT]
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P.L.F. Persio 
Netherlands
Local time: 23:53
Member (2010)
English to Italian
+ ...
| Treating, perhaps? | Feb 12 |
Denis Fesik wrote: Tom in London wrote:
She's Russian and her command of English is not secure.
She wrote "I hope you've all been threatening yourselves during the holidays" There's no way this can connect to anything a Russian could conceive in her mind that would be relevant in such a context. Prithee sire, what did she really mean by this? I know the ways of Runglish in and out, and still I can't figure out what it was. Maybe training? But training is so much easier to say for a Russian than threatening, and the only Russian word that readily connects to threatening is certainly out of the equation here [Редактировалось 2024-02-12 11:32 GMT]
| | | | | Thanks, I just missed the holidays aspect | Feb 12 |
P.L.F. Persio wrote: Denis Fesik wrote: Tom in London wrote:
She's Russian and her command of English is not secure.
She wrote "I hope you've all been threatening yourselves during the holidays" There's no way this can connect to anything a Russian could conceive in her mind that would be relevant in such a context. Prithee sire, what did she really mean by this? I know the ways of Runglish in and out, and still I can't figure out what it was. Maybe training? But training is so much easier to say for a Russian than threatening, and the only Russian word that readily connects to threatening is certainly out of the equation here [Редактировалось 2024-02-12 11:32 GMT]
Perhaps holidays could get me thinking in the right direction, but they don't lift the question of how you could get from treating to threatening—just phonetically
[Редактировалось 2024-02-13 05:07 GMT]
| | | | Kevin Fulton
United States
Local time: 17:53
German to English
Many decades ago (before MT translation became a thing), I was editing a series of documents pertaining to diesel engine repair. One instruction called for a non-greased screw to be inserted, then tightened. The translation read "Insert fat-free screw and tighten to a torque of ..." Other instructions in the translation called for fat to be applied to various components before reassembling.
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I saw this in an English -> Spanish translation, but alone in English, it can be a really tough cookie.
Left at the door: Take a left at the door.
Left at the door: Your package was left at the door.
Now, what I saw done in Spanish was:
Left at the door: zurdo en la puerta. When the correct translation should have been:
Left at the door: dejado en la puerta. Su paquete fue dejado en la puerta.
Outrageous!
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Raffi Jamgocyan
Türkiye
Local time: 00:53
Member (2012)
English to Turkish
+ ...
We have this Turkish word "elişi", which can be translated to English as handicraft, or depending on context, handwork. The English translation of a symposium on "elişi" training read: 12th Traditional Handjob Education Symposium
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