Anyone who’s ever tried to learn another language knows that translation is a difficult art to master. Cognates turn out to mean something else, prepositions aren’t used the same way, idiomatic expressions become meaningless.
For the more than 50 million Hispanics living in the United States, 38 percent of whom are bilingual, navigating between two languages is often a daily occurrence — and mistakes are known to happen.
Sometimes translation errors can lead to catastrophe. Take, for example, this mistranslation of a Delaware sign saying in English that children need parental supervision, but that in Spanish said children need a permit or they will be “susceptible to police action.”
More often than not, however, mistranslations simply sound funny. Reach Hispanics, a Hispanic marketing blog, took notice of the phenomenon yesterday in a Twitter post.
Not surprisingly, there’s a Flickr group devoted to documenting bad translations, and we’ve pulled a few of our favorites.
From overly literal translations to false cognates check out 10 of the best translation fails from English to Spanish and Spanish to English in the slideshow above. But don’t let the possibility of goofing up keep you from learning another language.
* This Blog was originally published on HuffPost.
