Posts Tagged ‘russian’
Wide Boiled Aircraft
A Russian airline once advertised “wide boiled aircraft for your comfort.” Read more airline-related translation bloopers in the article "'Airline pulp' and bad translations that can crash a plane," by Globalization Group vice president Adam Wooten.
Get Out of Jail Free with Google Mistranslation
In a 2010 legal mishap, “a Russian trucker in (the Netherlands) involved in a bar brawl was released because the (court) summons he received was poorly translated from Dutch into Russian using Google Translate,” reported the Dutch-English news blog 24oranges. Instead of reading, “you are to appear in court on 3 August 2010,” as it [...]
Google Translate has great uses, disastrous misuses
Google Translate and other free online translation tools can be great for instant, informal translation. When expectations are properly set, particularly for low-value text, unedited machine translation can be quite useful. However, when a user overestimates machine translation capabilities, the results can be confusing at best. When one online [...]
Do Not Assume Everyone Understands Basic Principles of Translation
"...just because someone in a company understands how to avoid the risks of producing bad translation does not mean everyone in a company does. Someone else — someone whose job description is not even supposed to include translation — may not know it is inappropriate to run your marketing collateral through a free online translator. Even the [...]
Poll: Top Translation Blunders of 2010
Translation blunders made news throughout the year 2010. By translation blunders, we are not referring to urban legends like President John F. Kennedy's alleged slip-up saying "I am a jelly doughnut" - that never happened. Nor are we referring to Dave Barry's satirical claim, "The CEO of Toyota appears before a congressional committee and [...]
Cultural Bridge Weight Limits
Bridges are incredibly useful and help many people reach important destinations quickly and easily. However, bridges can also be dangerous when misused, and exceeding a bridge's maximum load capacity can obviously result in disaster. Similarly, bilingual workers can be incredibly beneficial and can help bridge the gaps many organizations [...]
Localizing Humor
According to the article, "I don't get it: Humor lost in translation," it can be difficult to translate humor from one language or culture to another. Translators can sometimes find equivalent jokes that will be funny in the target language, but here are a few resources to help identify country-specific humor and jokes: Reader's Digest, "The [...]
Execution Yard
Russian prisoners at Lincoln Prison in England received a pamphlet informing them about prison facilities, including an "execution yard." They were almost certainly relieved to learn that "execution yard" was actually an English-to-Russian mistranslation of "exercise yard." Nick Hardwick, Chief Inspector of Prisons, said, "This is an example [...]
Hydraulic Rams
Unprofessional translators can really alter the meaning of a translation. Various reports indicate that a technical publication once translated the English words "hydraulic rams" into Russian as "wet sheep."
Language Use by Region
What are the top 10 languages by population in New York and other states? Where are the most Armenian speakers living in the United States? The U.S. Census used to track and report the number of language speakers for virtually every language in every state and county. This data was very useful for companies planning localized multilingual [...]
