Nov
5
As local organizers sought to promote next year’s festival, which will take place February 15, town hall staff relied on Google Translate to give them the Spanish language translation of “Feria do grelo” (Rapini Festival) on the town’s website, The Local, reports Spain’s La Voz de Galicia.
The Guardian added that the translated announcement read, in part: “The clitoris is one of the typical products of Galician cuisine”. Rapini, a traditional Galician dish, is a subspecies of turnip and is the southern European equivalent of “turnip tops” or “turnip greens”, which we in the USA may better know as broccoli raab. With the translation app believing Galician to be Portuguese, the word “grelo” automatically gets translated to an archaic Portuguese slang word for “clitoris“, although interestingly enough it does refer to the name of the vegetable in that country as well.
‘Since 1981, the festival has made the clitoris one of the star products of the local gastronomy’.
Google Translate error sees Galician town of As Pontes accidentally
Garcia told the site, “It was quite a surprise”.
The town is apparently considering filing a complaint with Google, which has since fixed the translation error, but may reconsider.
The townsfolk, while pleased with the interest that the mistranslation has generated, have vowed never to use Google Translate again.
“We discovered that Google translates any mention of grelos, on any website”, the same way, said town hall spokesperson Montserrat García.
The mistake remained on the town’s website for several months before someone noticed the error. The Guardian noted that the Galician word, “grelo” is now translated as “brote” or sprout. While it can translate Castilian Spanish and Catalan reasonably well, Google has not yet ventured into the language, Galego, spoken by people living in the Galicia region of northern Spain. But Garcia admitted she is still dissatisfied; according to her, “grelo” is “a vegetable from the turnip family”. When a word is translated, it usually looks for patterns across millions of documents to provide the best translation.
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