History BlindIdiotTranslation / RealLife

* Pick any online text translator. Pick a block of text--the beginning of Hamlet's most famous soliloquy, for example. Now translate it to any other language, and back again. This is sometimes known as "Babelfishing", after [=AltaVista=]'s (later Website/{{Yahoo}}'s) Babel Fish, one of the first online translators (it now exists as Bing Translator).

* Website/YouTube's "Transcribe Audio" function can result in this, especially if the person's voice is speaking fast or is slurred.

* The translation engine bundled with Website/YouTube captioning took the name of Russian architect Liubov Popova and insisted this meant, in English, ''Buy lube off pop-over''.

* The Hebrew for "not tested on animals" is "Lo nivdak al ba'alei chayim"[[note]]לא נבדק על בעלי חיים[[/note]]. However, "Chayim" can also be a given name, and "baal" means "husband", so this can also be translated as "Not [[TestedOnHumans tested on my husband Chayim]]".

** One translation which rendered the British anatomical slang term "bell-end" literally, as in "terminal section of a device that makes a ringing sound".

* A 2010 [[https://vcu.t2hosted.com/custom/displayReport.aspx?type=PERM&r=3008&PermissionUID=16130197&hash=3f2e3e695a469b4a9a34d665300a6b2c]] study by the National Institutes of Health in the United States revealed serious deficiencies with machine translations of prescription medication labels into Spanish. Some phrases such as "dropperfuls" weren't translated at all, some were translated incorrectly, like "by the little" instead of "by mouth" (with ''poca'' replacing ''boca''), and most alarmingly, "take once a day" became "take eleven a day" because ''once'' (pronounced own-say) means "eleven" in Spanish. Taking 11 times the prescribed dose is potentially fatal.

** The mentioned site contains what is probably one of the best (read: worst) Blind Idiot Translations ever: [[http://www.animejump.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=26&page=1 the INTERTLLR TERININATDR]] (also called Apolay Wayyioy).

* Many [[BlindIdiotTranslation Blind Idiot Translations]] of Chinese dish names are prime examples of various difficulties in translation. For example, the dish whose name literally translates "husband and wife lung slices" has that name because (a) the words for "lung" also means "tripe," and (b) the dish was reportedly invented by a couple who were street vendors in Sichuan in the 1930s. Likewise, "pock-marked grandmother tofu" is also supposed to be named after the woman who invented it. If you don't know the stories already, those names are as nondescriptive and unhelpful as, um, "hamburger" (named after the German city of Hamburg) or "sandwich" (named after an English nobleman). But even when the names are descriptive, it doesn't necessarily help: a lot dishes are named as ingredient plus cooking technique, but the techniques are often typical to China and have no straightforward translation into European languages (e.g., there's different words for regular stir-frying and the "explosive" variant that uses hotter oil and finer-cut ingredients).

* An English edition of the Helsinki Metro newspaper in Finland once titillated readers with the headline "150 kg? [[MostCommonSuperpower Biggest heroine bust ever]]!" So Creator/RobLiefeld and Creator/TiteKubo finally teamed up? Whoever this heroine is, her back must be killing her. [[spoiler:"''Heroin''" would have the correct word (for the drug); a "heroine" is a female protagonist. See TheBigListOfBooboosAndBlunders.]]

* An American journalist apparently can't get it into her head that [[https://twitter.com/Marek_Pek/status/1511626790703452160?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1511626790703452160%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwpolityce.pl%2Fmedia%2F593277-dziennikarka-politico-oburzona-nazwa-wagonow-wars "WARS" doesn't mean "wars"]] as in warfare, it's short for Wagony Restauracyjne i Sypialne (Dining and Sleeping Cars), the name of a company. A Polish company. Named in Polish. Not English. In 1948. See their [[https://wars.pl/menu/ menus here]].

** ''VideoGame/Minecraft'' videos get pretty strange. There's an item called an "Eye of Ender" and it's very good to have more than one, as they are necessary to find the Ender Portal. "Eyes of Ender" --> "Eyes a vender", "Eyes vender", "Eye vender", etc.

* According to [[http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005195.html this blog entry]], "Most of us, however, have all along suspected that this phenomenon resulted from reliance on faulty translation software. Indeed, it is easy to prove that absurd English translations are being spewed out daily in China when individuals who don't know English merely plug Chinese sentences into the software and expect it to come up with reasonable renditions." A bug in one particular translation program has caused the word "fuck" to appear on shop signs and restaurant menus, etc. because the Simplified Chinese character 干 can mean either "dry (fried)" or "do (fuck)" depending on context. Perhaps the most legendary example of this slip-up is [[https://i.imgur.com/Re9vT.jpeg this Chinese restaurant menu]], which turns '干爆鸭子' (''Gàn bào yāzi'', literally 'dry fried duck') into ''[[BestialityIsDepraved fuck the duck until exploded]]''.

----

* The government of China has [[http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/06/19/olympic.dishes/index.html released an official list of food name translations]] in the hope of stopping this problem for the Olympics. (It also appears that [[http://www.for68.com/new/2008/6/li8655365544181680024816-0.htm the list is online]], in Chinese.) The list isn't without mild mistakes, either. "Cuttlefish" is not the same thing as "octopus", for example, but at least they aren't calling it "flower branch" (cuttlefish) or "eight claw fish" (octopus).

* The "Irish Blessing" prayer, beloved of tourist knick-knack producers, aunts on Facebook and Americans with nigh-on homeopathic levels of Irish blood, begins "May the road rise to meet you", leading many to ponder the meaning of this strange idiom over the years. The truth is that it's a pure Blind Idiot translation. The original line is ""Go n-éirí an bóthar leat", a phrase meaning "may you succeed upon the road [figuratively meaning on your journey]". The verb ''Éirigh'' alone means "to rise", but ''Éirigh le'' (note the preposition, which becomes the ''leat'' at the end) is an idiom meaning "to succeed". A literal translation of the English line back into Irish would probably be "Go n-éirí an bóthar chugat", the road literally rising towards you.

** Google Translate's neural network algorithms actually have the ability to learn and pick up patterns... which sometimes results in them picking up patterns that don't exist. For instance, the German dub of ''WesternAnimation/SpongebobSquarepants'' [[DubNameChange renamed Squidward]] to "Thaddäus Tentakel"... and, somehow stemming from this, any instance of the name "Thaddäus" has decent chance of being translated as "Squidward". [[https://www.fernsehserien.de/oskar-der-fliegende-fluegel/folgen/2x07-der-verflixte-zweite-fluegel-194191 See for yourself]] with [[WesternAnimation/OscarsOrchestra Thaddius Vent]].

** An even more infamous — and tragic — example was the final trigger for one of mankind's worst catastrophes: when asked by journalists about the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Declaration Potsdam Declaration]], the Japanese Foreign Minister (as the proper politician he was) replied with the [[WeaselWords weasel word]] "[[https://www.nsa.gov/news-features/declassified-documents/tech-journals/assets/files/mokusatsu.pdf mokusatsu]]", which can mean both "No comment" and "I am ignoring it in contempt", the translation that got back to the Americans. Had it been translated correctly [[ForWantOfANail the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings may well not have happened]].

* In 2023, sportswear manufacturer Columbia put out an ad campaign inviting people to "be the goat": a pun between the expression "the G.O.A.T." ("greatest of all time") and the mountain goats featured in the ads for their mountain-hiking equipment. In Quebec, though, they translated the ads literally as "soyez la chèvre," [[https://globalnews.ca/news/9590985/columbia-ad-be-the-goat-french/ causing considerable befuddlement]]. Remarkably, they then doubled down, enjoying the increased notoriety (all the while insisting they really meant "be the goat," i.e. "be like these mountain goats").

* The story about UsefulNotes/JimmyCarter in Poland, however, is actually true and wasn't his fault, but the translator's; he was more familiar with Polish writing than speaking. Carter had said that he wanted to get to know the Poles better, but it was translated as "[[PerverseSexualLust I desire the Poles carnally]]"; presumably, the translator was claiming Carter wanted to know them in the ''biblical'' sense. Furthermore, when he meant to say he came from the US, he implied that he ''abandoned'' the US forever. Later in the same speech, the translator misinterpreted Carter's statements praising the Polish constitution to mean that he was saying their constitution was to be ridiculed, and his statement that he was happy to be in Poland was interpreted to mean that he was happy to "[[GroinAttack grab Poland by the balls]]". Finally, to top it off, he used Russian words in the finale, in a country with strong anti-Russian sentiments. The translator was soon replaced.