Nov
3
The Feira do Grelo in As Pontes de Garcia Rodriguez, a town in Galicia, north-western Spain, is an annual event celebrating rapini – a turnip-like vegetable often used in regional cuisine.
On the town hall’s Castilian Spanish website, the festival description read, “The clitoris is one of the typical products of Galician cuisine”, according to The Local.
Each year, the town of As Pontes, in the community of Galicia, celebrates its local rapini festival, which pays homage to the leafy green vegetable called broccoli rabe in the U.S.
“It was quite a surprise”, Montserrat García, the town’s spokesperson, told the Guardian.
The reason for the outrage is that grelo is also a Portuguese slang word for a lady’s love button. “At first, we didn’t believe what we were seeing”.
So where did Google Translate go wrong? A few festivalgoers spoke only Castilian Spanish, and that required the festival runners to write a Castilian Spanish version of their ad copy on their website, and-whoops-they used Google Translate.
“We discovered that Google translates any mention of grelos, on any website, to clitoris“, she said, adding that authorities are considering making a formal complaint to Google for not recognising the Galician language.
Google Translate is an automatic translator – that is, it works without the intervention of human translators, using state-of-the-art technology instead.
Google has confirmed that the translation error has now been fixed, but if you’re still intrigued by the idea of a vagina festival you can head further afield to Japan, where they’re actually a thing. “If people come across incorrect or inappropriate translations, they can let us know about them and we’ll be happy to fix them as soon as possible”.
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