Anecdotes the People of (Folklore)
- There's the wonderful urban legend
that the advertising slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation!" was mistranslated in China as "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead."
- Allegedly, the expression "Out of sight, out of mind" was once translated from English to Russian, and then back into English. It became "invisible idiot", which makes sense really.
- As of October 2009, trying this with the Babel Fish online translator yields the utterly incomprehensible result "From the eyes down, from the heart there."*
It got translated into the equivalent Russian idiom (which literally means something like "away from the eyes, out of the heart") and then word-by-word back into English.
