If you pay any attention to our regular blogs, you’ll know we don’t have too high an opinion of those who skimp on their language translation services. And it seems the Norwegian Winter Olympic Team have become the latest people to find out exactly how hilarious you can look when you get translation wrong.
It might be too late to retroactively add this one to our ‘2017 Translation Fail Awards,’ but we couldn’t resist bringing you this story anyway.
1,500 or 15,000?
The Norwegian Winter Olympic Team recently discovered that it’s surprisingly easy for 1,500 to turn into 15,000 at some point whilst translating between Norwegian and Korean. After thinking they ordered the former they found themselves with “half a truckload” of eggs – which was just a few more than intended.
The 109-person strong Winter Olympics team are currently in Pyeongchang, where the games themselves kicked off on February 9th. Luckily, the team were reportedly able to return the excess number of eggs they’d accidentally ordered before any real damage was done.
OL-leiren bestilte 1500 egg gjennom å oversette via Google Translate. Men det slo feil. 15.000 ble levert på døra. Vi ønsker lykke til og håper at de norske gullhåpene er glade – veldig glade – i egg: 😁 pic.twitter.com/qaWVpq1Xgy
— Trønder-Avisa (@tronderavisa) February 3, 2018
The complicated grammar of numerals in South Korea is such that it is incredibly easy to mix up the two numbers. Rumour has it that Google Translate was involved at some point in the process, to which we can only say – we told you so.
Language translation services
If you want to avoid an embarrassing incident like this when conducting your own business overseas, you’re going to want to make sure all your language translation services are carried out by somebody with a razor-sharp, native level knowledge of the language you’re translating into. There are some things that machine translation can just never quite grasp with the precision required.
Have a look through a selection of market sectors we’ve worked for to find out more about how we can help you translate with more success than the Norwegian Winter Olympic Team.
