It can certainly be exhausting to be all work and no play. We work through so many translations every day that quality control becomes a mindset more-so than a daunting task. Professional translations are only as good as the professionals you chose to work with, and the amount of effort they put into maintaining meaning across different languages. The challenges of maintaining meaning are many, including regional pronunciation confusion, synonyms, idioms and expressions, word-for-word grammar loss, and more. And while it’s never funny to see your international business flop because of a failure to overcome the language barrier, it is amusing to see past situations where corporations, small businesses, and even governments make mistakes when traversing language boundaries.

This blog, titled “Coffee Break” (for the time of day when we all can get a few good laughs in), delves into a world that translators, translation agencies, and their clients strive to avoid: The world of mistranslations.

Follow this blog to see funny situations of:

• Business mistranslations — Failed product packaging, launching, and marketing
• Government mistranslations
• Mistranslations in the News
• Hilarity of Machine Translation
• And much, much more providing you with laughable translations

Stay tuned for new posts over the coming weeks as we search the web and read the news to bring the funniest translations moments to this compendium of translation mistakes.