beetle juice

It used to be so common and so annoying. One goes out to by the latest fancy gadget, a cheap plastic toy or build-your-own furniture. Invariably, the box would contain an obscure sheet of paper detailing usefulness and operation of the purchased product. The sheet, made on an ailing copy machine, was mostly illegible, and there was no sense in the few decipherable words. Most were not in the dictionary, and they were not connected in any way Aunt Grammar would approve of. "Be tights part E with part I together", and your new table would be up in no time.

These days, such finds are rare. Be it that international competition forces manufacturers to put effort into translations or that automatic translation programs have improved beyond recognition. The effect is clear. Comprehensible instructions and manuals have become the norm.

I miss the old days somewhat. It was always amusing to derive sense from cryptic paragraphs, a little game and moments of fun that one didn't have to pay for. It came free with the object of desire.

Imagine my joy when I encountered a brilliant example of translation gone awry the other day at breakfast. I offered juice to my Spanish-speaking guest, asking ¿quieres jugo de escarabajo? She looked at me like I was mad. ¿Escarabajo? Are you sure? That's a beetle.

Well, I was pretty confident the juice wasn't supposed to contain beetles, but it clearly said so in the Spanish list of ingredients. I had originally bought the juice because it said rose hip in the English list of ingredients. What could be the cause of this discrepancy? Is there are second rarely used meaning for the word escarabajo? The dictionary says no. Helpfully, it informs us that rose hip is escaramujo, a word that is located exactly one entry down from escarabajo.

It's surprising that in the year 2008 a commercial operation is using a person to look up a translation in a dictionary – who promptly proceeds to get it wrong. Dictionary.com would have found the right translation in seconds and without room for error, but then a beautiful concoction wouldn't have seen the light of day, the world famous beetle juice.