Red faces in Galicia due to Google translation error

Many of us have tried to get some help by asking Google to translate  from Spanish to English and it is quite clear that the translation is often only an approximation of the actual meaning, but they have outdone themselves by turning a ‘Festival of Grelo’ (rapini, a broccoli like turnip top) into a ‘Festival of the Clitoris’!

The reason is quite simple, when translating from Spanish, the search engine uses Castilian Spanish as its base and if it doesn’t recognise a word it looks to other languages. In this case the word grelo comes from the Galician language and the nearest that Google could find was an archaic Portuguese slang word which it translated to clitoris to the general amusement of social media and newspapers.

Not so happy was the council in As Ponte de Garcia Rodriguez a town in Galicia, north-west Spain which supports the annual event which is to take place on February 15 next year. Their spokesperson Montserrat Garcia quickly alerted Google to the mistake and got them to rectify the situation so that the embarrassing translation no longer appears.