It was one of those moments that you really wish you had a camera handy. This is what I saw once on a HUGE sign outside a construction site. Someone (let's call him Tommy) had not bothered to hire a real translator--a professional! So he and his cohort Joey (who had had elementary Spanish 1, maybe, and who still had the dictionary) opened up the dictionary to "hardhat".... el casco. Ok, Joey, what's the word for "area"? Ugh... "area." OK then, "HARDHAT AREA" must be.... EL CASCO AREA. Yeah, that ought to do it.
Not really.
Someone who had studied even intermediate Spanish might have said, "Hey, guys, you can't just open a dictionary, slam two words together and think that you've got a translation."
So I'm starting a new series on the blog of bad translations. I know you've all seen those pages of bad translations to English. The site engrish.com is one of my favorites--I've even contributed to it.
What I'm going to post are some bad translations into Spanish--and I invite you to send in bad translations from English into other languages. Please explain the errors, if they're not immediately apparent to those who don't speak your language.
Monday, October 4, 2010
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