Jelly Donut Awards: The Top 5 Translation Errors of 2010
Translation attracted plenty of media attention in 2010, mostly for the wrong reasons. A US-based translation company decided to make an annual tradition of the embarrassment, and its Jelly Donut Awards recap the top five real translation, interpreting and localisation errors of the year.
The name honours the most enduring mistranslation story of all. John F. Kennedy stood in West Berlin in 1963 and declared Ich bin ein Berliner, which generations of schoolchildren have been told meant I am a jelly donut. It has since been firmly established that Kennedy said nothing wrong. The anecdote is too widespread, and frankly too charming, to abandon.
Here is what the year produced.
Number five: Rihanna rhododendron rebellion
When you are having ink permanently applied to your skin, you might expect a degree of proofreading. Rihanna skipped that step and acquired a neck tattoo reading rebelle fleur, intended as rebel flower in French.
The problem is word order. French, like most Romance languages, generally places the noun before the adjective that modifies it. Rebelle fleur gets the meaning across in the way a tourist gets a meaning across, but it is not proper French. She wanted fleur rebelle. The correction is one word swap and permanently unavailable.
Number four: German tram firm gets derailed
A German transport firm contracted to build a tram system in Edinburgh had to hit the emergency brakes after a mistranslation triggered a defamation lawsuit.
Discussing the financial state of the project, a project head described the firm, TIE, as delinquent. In English business usage this means behind on payments. When the story was translated into German, delinquent became Verbrecher, a word that can mean criminal. TIE, understandably outraged at being publicly labelled criminals, filed suit and business relations ground to a halt.
The whole affair could have been avoided by a proofreader who knew that false friends between English and German are a well-mapped minefield. That train, so to speak, had already left the station.
Number three: this one goes to eleven
The most dangerous entry on the list, and the one with actual casualties waiting to happen.
In New York City, medicine labels must be translated if a patient speaks one of the seven most commonly spoken languages in the city. In many cases pharmacies delegated this to automated translation software, and the software was not equal to the task. Some outputs were merely bizarre, instructing patients to apply to affected area twice to the indicated day like. Others were actively dangerous.
One patient was told to take his medicine eleven times a day. The correct dose was once a day. Any first-year Spanish student could explain what happened: once is the Spanish word for eleven. The translation engine could not tell an English adverb from a Spanish numeral, and nobody checked.
This is exactly why serious translation errors in medical contexts are treated as a patient safety issue rather than a linguistic curiosity. A funny label is a story. A dosage error is a coroner report.
Number two: Snow White and something you would rather not explain
A masterclass in knowing your source before you publish a translation. A Chinese publisher set out to release a children book, the timeless tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Reasonable enough.
Unable to obtain a copy of the story in the original German, they substituted a Japanese version instead. Still fine, in principle. Unfortunately the Japanese text they procured was not a traditional fairy tale at all. It was an erotic adaptation.
The publisher discovered this only after the book reached shelves and parents began complaining that the content was, to put it gently, inappropriate for the children it was marketed to. A recall and an apology followed.
Number one: translation does not work out for Russian prisoners
As if a prison sentence were not bad enough. Russian-speaking inmates arriving at Lincoln Prison in England were handed a welcome handbook describing the layout of the facility. In the Russian version, the exercise yard was mislabelled.
It read execution yard.
Whatever a new prisoner might have been feeling on arrival, that leaflet did not help. It is difficult to imagine a more efficient way to terrify someone with a single word.
What the list is actually about
The comedy is the hook. The pattern underneath is the point, and it repeats every year with tedious reliability.
- Nobody checked. Every entry on this list would have been caught by one competent bilingual reader spending five minutes with the text.
- Machine output went out unreviewed. Machine translation is a useful tool that becomes a liability the moment it is trusted without human review, particularly in medicine and law.
- Cost was the driver. The pharmacy that used software instead of a translator, the publisher that grabbed the wrong source text: both were saving money, and both spent far more cleaning up.
Professional translators collect these stories with a grim satisfaction, and the ongoing catalogue of them fills threads on r/translator daily. The joke, as ever, is that the fix was cheap and available the whole time. As for Kennedy, the record is clear: Ich bin ein Berliner was correct German, correctly used. The one mistranslation everyone remembers never actually happened.
How the winners get chosen
There is no committee and no trophy, which is probably for the best. The awards work by collecting the errors that made it into print, onto skin, into a prison handbook or onto a pill bottle, and ranking them by the gap between the effort required to prevent them and the damage they caused. Rihanna tattoo cost her one embarrassing adjective. The tram dispute cost a construction consortium months of legal wrangling. The mistranslated dosage could have cost a life. Ranked that way, the funniest entries sit at the bottom of the list and the ones nobody laughs at sit at the top, which is exactly the order in which any organisation should think about its own translation risk.