In a rapidly shrinking world, it's becoming more and more important to have translations that are both lightning-fast and actually understandable. To underline how hard this is, here's that sentence translated from English to Thai to Russian to Japanese and back to English, courtesy of Google Translate: Become increasingly important in order to convert the world to fall faster, as well as lightning, to understand the actual.
And as much as that sucked, it's nothing compared to these doozies.
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A Missed "I" Gives Us Martians
![6 Mistranslations That Changed The World]()
Back in 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli reported a rather shocking discovery: There were "canali," or canals, on Mars. Since canals are artificial by definition, this caused a shitstorm of speculation about the possibility of a long-vanished race of Martians who must have made the structures to irrigate their crops.
Istockphotos
Another common misinterpretation: "Mars is covered with cannoli."
But it wasn't Schiaparelli who really got Martian fever going. Astronomer Percival Lowell read Schiaparelli's work and his Mars boner got so hard that he moved to Arizona, constructed his own observatory and spent years publishing papers speculating that A) Mars was once populated by a civilized race of brilliant engineers, and B) those engineers created these canals as a last-ditch effort to save a dying planet.
There were only two problems: First off, Lowell was basically just drawing canals at random, apparently, as no one has been able to correlate any of his lines with actual stuff on Mars. He might as well have claimed he found ancient Rome in a cow turd.
Photo.com
"Hmm ... that's either the Vatican or a piece of sweet corn."
Second, and more importantly, "canali" doesn't mean "canals," it actually means "channels" or "trenches,' and Schiaparelli was just noting some totally natural terrain differences.
Via Wikimedia Commons
"Come on a-guys, did none of you actually a-look at Mars?" -- Giovanni Schiaparelli [citation needed]