MADRID, Nov 4 — Oh, Google Translate! You’ve tripped up another innocent user yet again.
A culinary festival celebrating grelo, the leafy green vegetable that is a staple in the Galician town of As Pontes in north-west Spain, saw a sudden surge of interest recently — and the good townsfolk naturally thought their marketing initiative had worked this year.
Unfortunately, to their horror, they had been inviting people to take part in a “clitoris festival”.
According to The Guardian, the unintentionally funny mistake came about because local officials had used Google Translate to put the Galician word grelo into Castilian Spanish.
It meant the town’s “Feria do grelo” or rapini festival became “Feria clítoris” in Spanish.
The Guardian added that the translated announcement read, in part: “The clitoris is one of the typical products of Galician cuisine. Since 1981... the festival has made the clitoris one of the star products of its local gastronomy.”
Montserrat García, the town’s spokeswoman, told the newspaper that the translation error was likely on the town’s official website for months before it was noticed late last week.
García said that the online translation tool mistook the Galician word for the Portuguese version, which refers to the vegetable but also can be used as slang for clitoris.
Google Translate has since changed the translation, with grelo now said to mean “brote” or sprout.
But García remains dissatisfied: “It’s still not the best way of describing grelo, as it is a vegetable from the turnip family.”
The townsfolk, while pleased with the interest that the mistranslation has generated, have vowed never to use Google Translate again.
