Earlier today, while I arranged a few crackers on a plate for a little lunch, I was confronted with the question of how spelt is spelled. This is not as obvious as it sounds. The cereal that is at the heart of this story – an elderly cousin of wheat that is making an unlikely comeback in healthy food trying to be hip – is spelled spelt and if you're American or under the influence, the past participle of spell is spelled spelled. However, in the archaic spelling that dominates Anglican English (burnt, dreamt, spoilt), the past participle of spell is spelt. Could confusion arise? Even when they're spelled identically, it takes some effort to mix up the two words.
The folks at Fudges who made the crackers I had on my plate managed the unlikely feat. They call their product Spelt Flatbreads. So far so good; I have no objection to this. However, the three translated lists of ingredients – a testament to the Dorset Village Bakery's international ambitions – are of a different kind. In all three languages, as far as I can tell and discounting a missing accent here and failed capitalization there, everything is translated to exacting standards. Everything, that is, but spelt, the defining ingredient.
The French crackers contain blé épélé; the Spanish ones, trigo deletreado. While my Spanish isn't particularly good, the root of deletreado gives away what dictionaries later confirm. Both terms mean spelled wheat. So does the German one. Buchstabierter Weizen doesn't make any literal sense. (I'd call this a dyslocation, the combination of two words that never go together, the opposite of a collocation.)
Normally, when a machine or a minion in China butchers a text, the sense can be extricated. You can still operate the toaster or assemble the shelving unit, but there are spelling errors and oddly chosen words, and the grammar can be off. Mehl des buchstabierten Weizens, in contrast, is grammatically flawless, using the challenging genitive case masterfully. All inflectional affixes, the constant scourge of learners of German, are used correctly and in the right places. No one would be able to make sense of flour of the spelled wheat, but everyone would understand its literal meaning*.
Who is responsible for this printed nonsense? At first I thought a local high-school student on work placement wasn't quite as strong in German as his C.V. had promised, and creativity took over where ability left off. But that wouldn't explain the same mistranslation in three languages. Maybe a dissatisfied intern played a practical joke that went undetected?
Maybe it's much simpler than that. Any printed dictionary will at the very least prevent you from getting it wrong and, most likely, give you the right translation of spelt. Google Translate gives it to you as well. Curiously, tough, Babel Fish, now part of Yahoo, doesn't. It only finds the inflected verb. Douglas Adams would be turning in his grave if he knew that his invention of a universal in-ear translator were responsible for nonsensical crackers.
Even if the Yahoo translation got it wrong, I'm not sure who got the grammar right. Someone must have read this and modified it before it was printed on the box. How come no one realized the mistake? The French blé épélé doesn't exist on the web as a phrase. That's as strong an indicator as you need.
My solution, by the way, for difficult translations is Wikipedia. Never mind the precision of the definitions, the articles in different languages give you not only the word you're looking up but also context, usage and often pictures. Spelt, unambiguously, is Dinkel in German, épeautre in French and espelta in Spanish.
(*) It is a bit beside that point that even if anyone would want to use that term for some reason, no one would say it like this. In German, spelled wheat flour would be buchstabiertes Weizenmehl, just like in English, except for the compound noun so beloved by Germans.
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