Some time ago one of us spent the weekend in Venice with a rather attractive Italian girl following a conference presentation. (We should make it clear that they hadn't just met at the conference!) They stayed at the Metropole, one of Venice's palace hotels. Here are some pictures of it:
That stay put us on their mailing list and a mailing arrived a few days ago. It told us about the forthcoming Redentore Festival, a Manet exhibition in association with Musee D'Orsay in the Doges Palace, and after all that culture there was a promotional offer of four nights stay for the price of three.
Here is the promotional offer:
"Be different, be our REPEAT guest." Surely they don't mean that? Does no one ever go back again? We suspect they meant something different, but it got lost in translation.
And some time ago we were working in Ukraine (a dreadful place, by the way). We were briefing a research agency and the stimulus had been sent to the agency in advance by the client's ad agency in London, who had got it translated. On arrival at the Ukrainian research agency the charming moderator said "What language is the stimulus in?" - The ad agency had translated it into the wrong language!
At about the same time we were looking for a translation service in the Czech Republic. We did a Google search for Czech translation services. Unsurprisingly the websites were multilingual. Not very encouragingly, two of them had mistranslated the English......
All amusing errors, but translating one language into another shouldn't be that difficult, should it? Just get a local to check it, for goodness sake!