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Saturday, February 28, 2015

The Famed Delicatessens of al-Andalus

I saw these a few weeks ago in the supermarket and was desperately curious how such a malapropism was introduced into the label of this brand of molasses:


I assumed that it was some kind of mechanical translation issue and spent a few minutes trying to put various things back and forth between Spanish, Portuguese, English, and Arabic in Google Translate to see if I could reproduce the error; I came up with sort of a long shot but didn't think it was probably what had happened.

Then, when we were driving to Córdoba with the students, we passed a sweet shop just off the highway that was a shop that sold "delicación." It's a less-common word that's used to describe jiggly desserts, such as flan and jello-molds, and I could imagine the semantic range including molasses and molasses-based desserts.

Not only do the words sound similar, but if you type "delicación" into Yelp, it asks you if you meant to search for directions to a delicatessen, demonstrating that there are algorithms that seem to think, erroneously, that they are the same thing.

2 comments:

  1. So it's not just stores in SF that have problems with translation into Spanish :D

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