Friday Funnies: Hilarious Mistranslations – Or Reasons to Hire a Professional Translator!


While language translators and interpreters will always do their best to get not just the right translation, but the very best one, many people running businesses and decide to take a stab at it themselves. While choosing the wrong word from a list of options in a dictionary, let’s hope it doesn’t cost you any valuable search traffic online, or impede your reputation offline!

However, it is almost worth the mistakes for the hilarity that comes out of translations from time to time. We’ve seen a lot of funny little mistakes around but here are some of our favourites! Enjoy everyone and hope your week is off to a great start.

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  • Restaurant window: Don’t stand there and be hungry. Come on in and get fed up.
  • In a Norwegian cocktail lounge: Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar.
  • In a Nairobi restaurant: Customers who find our waitresses rude ought to see the manager.
  • In an East African newspaper: A new swimming pool is rapidly taking shape since the contractors have thrown in the bulk of their workers.
  • From the Soviet Weekly: There will be a Moscow Exhibition of Arts by 15,000 Soviet Republic painters and sculptors. These were executed over the past two years.
  • In a Copenhagen airline ticket office: We take your bags and send them in all directions.
  • Outside a Hong Kong tailor shop: Ladies may have a fit upstairs.
  • In a Bangkok dry cleaner’s: Drop your trousers here for best results.
  • In a Rhodes tailor shop: Order your summers suit. Because is big rush we will execute customers in strict rotation.
  • From a brochure of a car rental firm in Tokyo: When passenger of foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage then tootle him with vigor.
  • Detour sign in Kyushu, Japan: Stop: Drive Sideways.
  • In an advertisement by a Hong Kong dentist: Teeth extracted by the latest Methodists.
  • Doctor’s office, Rome: Specialist in women and other diseases.
  • On a South African building: Mental health prevention centre.
  • Sign at Mexican disco: Members and non-members only.
  • In a Czech tourist agency: Take one of our horse-driven city tours — we guarantee no miscarriages.
  • Advertisement for donkey rides in Thailand: Would you like to ride on your own ass?
  • At a Budapest zoo: Please do not feed the animals. If you have any suitable food, give it to the guard on duty.

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