Google Translate Turns Culinary Festival Into 'Clitoris Festival'
Thanks to a Google Translate error, a culinary festival that takes place in northern Spain is receiving some odd attention.
In the Galician town of As Pontes, a festival intended to celebrate a leafy green vegetable known as the grelo has been promoting itself as a “clitoris festival.”
As reported in The Guardian, the townsfolk were shocked at the mistranslation.
“At first, we didn’t believe what we were seeing," said As Pontes spokeswoman Montserrat García.
Festival officials wrote the initial announcement for the annual celebration in Galician, a language spoken in the northern Spanish region. Using Google Translate to create the Spanish-language version of the announcement, the organizers ended up making the festival sound like an adult-themed event.
The innocent electronic mistake turned the words “Feria do grelo” (rapini festival) into “Feria clítoris” in Spanish. The announcement read: “The clitoris is one of the typical products of Galician cuisine. Since 1981 ... the festival has made the clitoris one of the star products of its local gastronomy.”
Festival officials are contemplating whether they should file a formal complaint with Google.
“They should recognize Galician and translate it accurately,” García said.
Google Translate has fixed the translation error by making the world “grelo” correspond to “brote,” or sprout. The fix is apparently still inaccurate, as a grelo is not a sprout, but a vegetable from the turnip family.
Although displeased with the mistake, García said the embarrassing error has created some definite buzz over this year’s festival. “It’s become a means -- albeit a very odd means -- of promoting our festival,” she said.
As reported in Search Engine People, the errors of Google Translate seem to attract the most attention when sexual connotations are involved.
A Frenchman asking someone to take a "dirty picture" for him had his words translated into “Take a picture for me slut,” while a text asking when Justin Bieber would hit puberty was translated in Vietnamese into the fatalistic sounding “Justin will never reach puberty.”
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