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Un error de traducción que puede ser mortal (literalmente)

 

Sometime ago, I’ve received an invitation to participate in a discussion in one of the Linkedin groups we belong to.  Members of Portada, a source on Marketing and Media to Hispanics were having quite an interesting exchange on a machine translation gone very wrong.

A pharmaceutical lab had placed a bilingual label on the container of one of their drugs, sporting one of the worst spanish translations I had my displeasure of reading. While the label read in English, “Best if used by date shown on end of can”, the Spanish line suffered a translation “Mejor de ser usado durante la fecha por el final del puede”. Not being enough, the whole jest arrived to the grand finale of the English line “Store in cool dry place”, while the translation in Spanish was printed as “Tienda en un lugar Chulo, Seco”.

spanish translation errors in medicine bottle

Click the image to enlarge

After I calmed down from the initial surprise, I’ve got to pondering on how many levels of wrong, this short translation was resting. Many members of the forum were rightfully indignant at the obvious disregard for the native language of the intended audience; that was just the beginning. The Spanish translation of the label didn’t make any sense. It was evident that this was an automatic translation that was never reviewed or corrected.

What made it worst was the presence of the word “chulo”, that according to the geographical background of the Hispanic reader, it could be translated as “nice”, “beautiful” or “pimp”.

It appears that the translation software that the pharmaceutical company used, translated cool = nice = chulo and it did not construe the right meaning on the usage of the word “cool”, in reference to temperature, or that the human operator that surely was sleep at the wheel. In any case, the word should have been translated as “fresco”.

In addition, whatever software they have used, was just laying the translations literally and literally wrong. The meaning of the words “store” and “can” were also translated completely wrong; the first being a verb and the second a subject. Even Google got the whole translation 98% right!

Now, I don’t want to paint the automatic translation or wholesale translations as the bad guys of this post. The fault lies with people that are shortchanging Spanish translation with obvious disregard for the correct syntax and usage of the language. I can continue listing errors in these two sentences, but as I do not want to turn this into a grammatical lecture, I will just touch on the surface of what bothered me the most; the blatant disregard of sound judgment that this pharmaceutical company exhibits to their intended customers.

Leaving aside the lack of respect to their Hispanic clients, I find myself pondering that this is more a safety issue. Today, we are only talking about the translation errors on a couple of directions on the medicine storage indication, but how many prescriptions labels could have come from this same pharmaceutical company with graver errors and more importantly, how many of those labels could contain the erroneous translation of the Dosage section or the Indications section. That really makes my skin crawl.

It is my guess that these kinds of companies make enough profits. Can they not hire a real human Spanish Translator to at least appeal to a market they are intent on marketing to?

Dear pharmaceutical, this kind of translation error cannot be taken lightly as an error here could cause illness of even death to a person!