Not an hour goes by that we don’t receive an e-mail announcing a press release from a vendor. What we find most interesting is when a company issues a press release but fails to tell us (or anybody else) that it’s out there. That happened back in May when SDL noted that “Spanish leaves global marketers lost in translation.” Quoting the press release, “According to SDL, the top five worst translation mistakes made by companies looking to expand into the Spanish-speaking world” were the usual hackneyed examples of bad translation. These included “I saw the Pope” (el Papa) translated as “I saw the potato” (la papa), the “Got milk?” slogan rendered as “Are you lactating?” in Spanish, and Parker introducing its non-leaking fountain pen in Spain with the slogan “it won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you,” with the translator buddying up with a false friend (embarazar means pregnant, not embarrassed). At least they left out the old chestnut about the Chevy Nova (no va — get it?) in Latin America and the rumored over-medicated U.S. Latina who interpreted the “once a day” on her prescription as “11 times a day.”

What’s going on here? It’s all about search engine optimization. SDL cited these examples plus economic figures for Latin American growth to improve its SEO rankings for the Hispanic market. The company’s CMO figured that becoming associated with these sometimes apocryphal mistranslations was a good way to improve SDL’s search engine rankings. Of course, we’re doing the same here by recycling these oft-told tales of mistranslation.

But wait — there are some really good examples of bad translations and cross-border mistakes out there. Here are a few of our favorites:

• For our 2002 keynote at the SAE’s TopTec Multilingual Communication for the Automotive Industry conference, we found candidates for “Bad Product Name of the Year” among Japanese car makers selling in Latin America: Mazda Laputa (interpreted by Spanish speakers as la puta), Mitsubishi Pajero (slang for onanist), and Nissan Moco (snot). In that speech we cited an auto show description of the Laputa that might not be suitable for children — “Laputa ha mejorado su seguridad y ampliado su interior… Cuerpo diseñado para resistir impactos frontales.” Check that out at Yahoo! or Google free MT sites.
• More recently, Car and Driver magazine reviewed the translated claims of Chinese automakers at the Detroit Auto Show. The brochure for the Liebao CS6 SUV claimed “Gene of being Wild: VM engine brings you the long-awaited shock… only by stepping on the accelerograph, the mph will come to the peak in a second” and the BYD F3 sedan has “fuel efficiency stomach.”
• Back to the subject of product names, we noticed a stand for a firm selling “Hyper STD” at the tekom conference in Wiesbaden, Germany last November (see photo above). Yuck! Most American buyers would steer clear of products associated with Sexually Transmitted Diseases.
• When we tried the WiFi at the tekom conference Hotel Klee am Park in Wiesbaden, we read the English-language instructions that told us: “General technical supposition is a reticulation-card. Please arrange your reticulation-card to IP (automatic internet register).” Huh?
• The classic post-Sputnik mistranslation of “wet sheep” for “hydraulic rams” in a Soviet science journal is an under-used classic example. That’s baaaad! Next time you think about referencing the Nova, try this one instead.
• A friend who was an interpreter at the United Nations told us about a colleague who tried to amplify an emotionally-delivered idiomatic expression, suggesting that “we need to grab the bull by something other than the horns.” Ouch.

But bad translations aren’t always funny. They can have serious consequences:

• Financial markets will shake. Back in May 2005 a reporter for the China News Service pieced together a story about how currency appreciation might affect the market. The People’s Daily had it translated into English without the subjunctive case, stating that China decided to revalue its currency 1.26% a month for a year. Bloomberg’s spider in London picked up the story and European equity markets rose on the news. While it was quickly repudiated, the error did cause market tremors.
• Armies can advance without consequence. In August 1968 U.S. Army transcribers reportedly wrote down a transmission from a Soviet tank column as “my perexali most” rather than “my priexali v Most.” What was heard (a routine bridge-crossing exercise by a tank column) was not what happened (the arrival of Soviet tanks in Most, a city in sovereign Czechoslovakia).
• Countries might disappear. In October 2005 Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad reportedly called for Israel to be wiped off the map, but apparently he really “just” wanted to get rid of its government. True to form, Ahmadinejad didn’t clarify his remarks after the mistranslation, further complicating matters.
• Companies will get into trouble. A senior executive at Yahoo! had to apologize for not giving U.S. Congressmen information about the company’s role in the imprisonment of a Chinese dissident, Shi Tao. According to Yahoo!, a bad translation by an employee of a 2004 order from the Chinese government caused the problem.

None of the mistakes after the “But wait” in this posting were machine translation miscues — they’re just bad translations by humans. Caveat lector!