Spanish ministry blunders with machine translation
The website of the Spanish Ministry of Industry has an exemplary display of ineffective use of machine translation : A woman named Dolores del Campo is erroneously translated as ‘pain of field’.
A screenshot of the translation blunder was tweeted yesterday by senior Reuters correspondent Sonya Dowsett. Another translator quickly replied to point out that according to the website, there is a ‘tourism minister of Equator’. Simply browsing through the poorly translated headlines will yield you several more translation blunders in a similar vein.
Curiously, most popular translation kits don’t produce the translation in the image as long as the name remains capitalized. It is likely that Microsoft Translator was the culprit, as that is the only translator I could find that produces this translation.
Hilarious as these mishaps may seem, ineffective use of machine translation can really hurt your business and its reputability. Always make sure that your translations are carried out by translator with native speaker status in the source and target languages.
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