5 Translation Fails That Led To Comedy And Madness

Well, they ran into a little bit of an effing problem, so to speak. Carter found that the translations kept glitching in extremely bizarre, R-rated ways:

Global TimesIt didn't help that the translator inexplicably replaced his voice with Samuel L. Jackson's.

That would've been a pretty bold new choice of tagline for the software, right there. But instead, they kept reshooting it and had to plow through a bunch of other translation mistakes, and filming took way longer than expected. The glitch was reportedly caused by China's "Great Firewall," the nationwide censorship net that often interrupts certain services in unexpected ways ... although "adding random F-words to banal sentences" probably isn't the most efficient way to censor information. It relays the same message, just more rudely. Carter compared the speech patterns to "the icebox robot from the 1970's flick Logan's Run, but with Tourette Syndrome." Which, again, would be an awesome slogan for the product, were the target market Spencer's Gifts and not, y'know, schools and businesses.

Theoretically, Welsh-speaking truck drivers were so baffled by this cryptic motto that they'd turn around anyway.

Yep, they manufactured and installed a sign with an "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated" out of office auto-reply on it, and at no point did anyone think to show it to an actual Welsh person. It wasn't a onetime blunder, either. Welsh speakers had already pointed out tons of comical errors on other signs throughout the country, including one telling pedestrians to "look right" in English and "look left" in Welsh (close!), and another telling cyclists in Cardiff that they had problems with an "inflamed bladder."

At least it keeps things entertaining for the local Welsh speakers, even if they're all clearly gonna die in traffic accidents.

This might have something to do with the ways you write 1,500 and 15,000 in Korean:

Classic typo. Basically the Korean version of mixing up handwritten 1's and 7's.

It wasn't entirely clear whether the mistake was a translation error, a typo, or intentional mischief by Korean yolk-loving leprechauns, but the end result was, let's say, enough for some leftovers.

Chef Stale Johansen (yes, the chef's name is "Stale") said the team was able to return the extra eggs, but not before taking one of those "Oops too many eggs" selfies the teens are always snappin' nowadays:

Fingers crossed this becomes the next hot inexplicable YouTube trend.

Tore Ovrebo, the head of the Norwegian team, also called the mix-up "not a big deal." Yeah, maybe not to you, but those chickens were shitting bricks.

The potential consequences went beyond getting some Ukrainian high school students bad grades on their homework, since at least one major Ukrainian newspaper uses Google Translate to turn their entire site into Russian for the international edition.

GoogleWe'd avoid drinking tea from now on if we were the editor, especially if it has a greenish glow.

While some noticers of obvious things might claim this looked an awful lot like an intentional hacking, Google attributed the ultra-specific glitch to an automatic bug, adding that the translator tool operates "without the intervention of human translators." Which makes total sense. Sometimes, two broadly similar languages can have little coincidences, like the names of countries turning into fictional Tolkien hellscapes, or proper names turning into goofy insults. That's just normal, easily-correctable stuff you'll encounter with any algorithm. It's like how Amazon will see products you've recently purchased, then suggest, "The Israelis have NO CLAIM to the Golan Heights. Also, need more printer ink?"

On the plus side, surely if any two countries can easily forgive and forget, it's Russia and Ukraine, right? Two best buds with virtually zero history of tension. If anything, they probably laughed it off arm-in-arm over a nice cold ... what's the Russian word for vodka? *Types it into Google Translate.* "Imperialist Murder Juice?" That can't be right ...

Vodka is actually derived from the Russian word for water. Maybe pick up a Rosetta Stone guide to Russian and learn more, lord knows it's a valuable language nowadays.

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For more, check out 6 Mistranslations That Changed The World and The 5 Most Disastrous Typos In Human History.

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