Here's a classic from the archives. It was featured on the BBC News website in October 2008.
Swansea council got lost in translation when it was looking to prevent lorries using a road near a supermarket in the Morriston area of the city.
All official road signs in Wales are bilingual, so the local authority emailed its in-house translation service requesting the Welsh version of: "No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only".
They thought the reply they received was what they needed so officials set the wheels in motion to create the large sign in both languages.
The notice went up and all seemed well - until Welsh speakers began pointing out the embarrassing error.
Unfortunately, the email response had said in Welsh:
"I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated".
just want to add some:
ReplyDeleteOn the menu of a Swiss restaurant:
Our wines leave you nothing to hope for.
-makes me smile much.such a lost on swedish translation.
Thanks very much, Kelly.
ReplyDeleteIf you have any more funny translations, please send them to peter (at) mytypohumour (dot) com and I'll publish a post devoted to them.