Translations gone wrong

Mine. And other people's.

Mine have once again managed to mess up my life, as if they had a will of their own. As if every now and then, mostly when things are looking normal and calm, a new translation comes to life to remind me I am getting dangerously close to the deadline. And so I panic. Which on the one hand is good because it adds up to the quality of my work - or maybe not? I couldn't tell, since not a single translation has been done without the stress factor. Oddly enough, even though I almost never finish my translations on time, I can't imagine life without them and there's nothing I'd give them up for. It just gets a little messy when I have to mix them with my day job. And my dance school. And the new salsa school, the diploma paper, the trip and its million little details, Portuguese lessons, social life and the Uni. Maxi thinks I have a schedule busy beyond sanity. I sometimes think she's right, some other times I think she's overreacting.

Luckily in my case a translation gone wrong means a month or two of hysteria, less sleep than usual and a hint of nostalgia when the process is over. When translation goes wrong and there's a brand involved then proportions change, campaigns fail and entire markets are disillusioned. Let it never be said that a translator's job is easy and of little relevance. Examples follow, as this was actually the purpose of my whiny digression:

Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux in the US: "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux"

Coors beer in Spain: "Turn it loose" translated as "You will suffer from diarrhoea"

Frank Perdue's chicken in Spain: "It takes a strong man to make a tender chicken" translated as "It takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate"

Pepsi in Taiwan: "Come alive with the Pepsi generation" translated as "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead"

(source: Matt Haig, Brand Failures)

And that brings me to the last order of business on today's agenda - I was about to make an attempt at translating from Portuguese a very funny post about a phenomenon we are currently dealing with in Poland, namely cinnamon hysteria. It's only obvious why I changed my mind, but you might want to give it a try, especially if wherever you go you are offered products that smel and taste like cinnamon simply because it's winter (luckily Warsaw looks like early autumn and smells like city dirt, which is definitely not what we might call a typical Polish winter and it's just another perfect reason to postpone some more and take El Santino out for a ride). Anyway, here's the cinnamon paranoia, I'm off to find some more excuses.