Tuesday, July 8, 2014

The Mistaken Assumption that Google Translate Never Fails.

by Agnes Poliquin
We have been very fortunate to experience Italian dining on our own, but we also have been treated to group dinners and lunches occasionally. Most recently, we traveled as a group to Urbino, Italy and had a group lunch. Naturally, the menu was in Italian and since I forgot to bring my Italian- English dictionary, my friend Jessica and I turned to Google to translate. This is a cultural norm as an American and the mistaken assumption that Google Translate never fails.

However, when Jessica and I looked up the meaning of certain words, they turned out to be a vague description of what the food actually was.

Jessica and I decided to play it “safe” and order for our group lunch what we thought was an American sausage pizza. However, when our pizza arrived, we discovered that the Italian word “wurstel” is a form of a hot dog. Google Translate told us ambiguously that “wurstel” means a sausage. Technically, a hot dog is a form of sausage. We had ordered a hot dog pizza. The taste was less than glorious. This cultural dissonance was not only an example of language barrier, but our instinctual American cultural rules of depending on Google for answers.

For your information, a plain sausage pizza is a pizza con salsiccia.

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