In a morbid but rather hilarious illustration of why people should be extremely cautious when using translation services to speak with people fluent in a different language, a planned fun activity with children at a daycare turned into a nightmare for some parents being informed of it.
A Times of Israel journalist, Haviv Rettig Gur, shared a story from an Israeli father who was horrified upon receiving a message from a kindergarten asking him to consent to his daughter getting makeup on her face, presumably as a pre-Purim activity.
So, what’s wrong? Well, this particular father is not a native speaker of Hebrew, and so he ran the message through Google Translate. It didn’t go well.
The translation service translated the Hebrew as such: “Good morning, we want to cremate the children today. If there is a parent who objects, please send me a private message.”
It appears Google Translate was confused by the word לאפר, which mean ‘to paint’ or to ‘to put makeup on’ – not ‘to cremate.’
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12 Responses
Thousands of (secular) Jews decide to go the route of cremation every year, and you use the terminology of “hilarious”? Certainly there must be a better adjective.
This should be your biggest problem.
There was something similar when Israeli Neta Barzilai won the Eurovision contest. Netanyahu put out a congratulatory tweet to her that started with “Neta, kapara alayich” – a Hebrew expression that roughly translates as “Neta, you sweetheart”. Google Translate, though, rendered it as something like “Neta, you’re such a cow” – which, given her size, was particularly bad. I specifically remember that one (non-Israeli) reporter tweeted a screenshot of the original and translation with a comment of “Umm… that can’t be right”.
These types of things are not that uncommon.
an Israeli Yid
I just ran it through and got “make up the children”. I suspect fake news.
Using online translation can produce very unprofessional – and very hilarious – results!
I was once looking through a restaurant menu in Jerusalem and saw an item described as “premium surgeon meat”. I looked at the Hebrew menu and saw that it said בשר מנתח מובחר. I roared with laughter and called the waiter over and said that he should show his boss the hysterically funny mistake. Mi’netach means “from a cut/piece” i.e. a premium cut of meat, but the online translation misread it as menatei’ach – a surgeon.
A while back, someone told me about an even more ridiculous online (mis)translation. The label on a bottle of wine said “with no suspicion of foreskin” – ללא חשש ערלה ;-)!!
I think that one wins the prize, although לאפר is a close second.
TGIShabbos, cremation is not a hilarious subject, but the mistranslation is very funny!
@anIsraeliYid,
Do your warped twisted zionist anti-semitic views simply go hand in hand with watching/keeping up to date with/following open Schmutz contests, that all Gedolim decried and protested (yes I am assuming this, as you are the one that deemed it fit and unashamed- to discuss a woman’s physical characteristics, which to every normal Jew is downright pritzus (maybe the mizrachi lunatic half evangelicals half Jews wouldn’t agree), or is one the reason for the second…..
Machine translation is inherently flawed. Human language is too complex and too context dependent to be dealt with by a machine. This is hardly a new problem. Even 40 years ago they were trying to do translations between Russian and English, and the English saying “the spirt is willing but the flesh is weak” was translated to Russian, and the result back to English, and it came out as “the vodka is strong but the meat is rotten”.
And translating between a Semitic language and an Aryan language are especially difficult since the grammar is totally different, plus that most Semitic languages are sufficiently regular that they skip vowels from written text, since they are easily added by context.
So if you want to communicate with humans, trash your smartphone and learn a language the old fashioned way.
At first I was baffled by a comment on a restaurant on Google, “great food, great price, waste of time”
Google translate didnt understand the expression, “Chaval al hazman”
@pure yiddishkeit, maybe you should ask yourself what you’re doing on the internet? never mind your venomous sinas chinam! (especially now during these difficult times!)
pure yiddishkeit,
Wow, just wow! On Taanis Esther no less, you spew forth such hatred. If you were the Satmar Ruv zt’l, okay, perhaps you can claim you are simply a true kanoi. But you are VERY far from the Satmar Ruv zt’l. As 416cheddy points out – Gedolim were also very against the internet. For one who calls themself “pure yiddishkeit” you probably should be doing your work and that’s it, no Yeshivaworld and following terrible apikorsus. Shame on you. The well known Chazal comes to mind – kol hapoisel bemumoi poisel (sorry, don’t have hebrew typing readily available now, hopefully you understand the lushon treifa also)
@pure narishkeit – get a life.
an Israeli Yid
To “pure yiddishkeit”. Wow. I didn’t realize your version contains so much hatred. Think about it.
My version of funny Restaurant menu is
“Seizure salad” with durm sticks.