Argentina’s national team did very well and reached the World Cup final with a convincing 3-0 win over Croatia, the reigning runners-up to the world champion. Led by captain Lionel Messi, Argentina’s win was never in doubt. In celebration of the win, team Argentina tweeted a post in several languages to announce their ascent to the world’s biggest sports event.
🇮🇹 Siamo finalisti
🇵🇹 Somos finalistas
🇺🇸 We are finalists
🇫🇷 Nous sommes finalistes
🇩🇪 Wir sind Finalisten
🇳🇱 Wij zijn finalisten
אנחנו גמורים🇮🇱
نحن المتأهلون للتصفيات النهائية 🇸🇦
🇨🇳 我们是决赛选手
🇯🇵 私たちはファイナリストです🇦🇷 Muchaaaaachos… 🎶 pic.twitter.com/GE1w8e4yqQ
— Selección Argentina 🇦🇷 (@Argentina) December 13, 2022
Unfortunately for Argentina, they decided to use machine translation (MT) for the tweet. The Hebrew text was mistranslated to אנחנו גמורים, which translates to WE ARE FINISHED in English. Which is the exact opposite of what they wanted to say.
This is yet another example of a funny translation which makes the publisher (team Argentina in this case) look foolish.
There is a lesson in this for everyone. Don’t rely on MT for anything important. If you do use MT, give it to a professional linguist for review before using it in a public forum.
That is a really funny case, but it really goes to show how unreliable MT can be sometimes no matter how much it has advanced in all these years. But it still is much better than it was like 10 years ago