Amazon’s Swedish Translation Fails - Creative Word

No matter where you’re based in the world, it is likely you’ve heard of the retail giant Amazon and are familiar with your country’s Amazon website or their Amazon Global distribution which ships to every continent in the world. Amazon are the ultimate global company but their most recent launch shows they may still have a few lessons to learn regarding translation and localisation.

The online retailer launched the Swedish version of their site recently and it caused an instant social media storm – for all the wrong reasons!

The site, which is entirely in Swedish, appears to have had some of the products, and their descriptions, automatically translated leading to some rather dubious and rude translations.

Tweets began appearing almost instantly, with Twitter users poking fun at the retail giant’s machine-generated translation attempts.

One user spotted a greetings card depicting a duckling in a field which had been listed as söta-ansikte-kuk or ‘sweet-face-dick’!

But it gets worse…

Several products included the term våldtäkt (rape/sexual assault), which was probably mistranslated from English ‘rape’ referring to the flower ‘rapeseed’.

Knitted egg warmers, in the shape of cockerels or chickens, were translated to ‘kuk’ (most likely from the English ‘cock’ a shortened version of cockerel but also a slang term for penis) leading to ‘hand-knitted penises’ being advertised for sale.

Even leading designers such as, Calvin Klein, weren’t safe from the dreaded automatic machine translation with their ‘trunks’ (another English slang term meaning underwear) advertised as ‘men’s luggage space’.

An innocent tiling trowel became a ‘professional self-adhesive scrotum’ when it was mistranslated as ‘professionell självhäftande pung’, and a strap for securing cargo to transport instead became a ‘drug strap’ when it was translated as ‘knark spännband’.

There were also translations which were nearly accurate, but a too-literal translation rendered them into laughable objects such as, ‘die-cast’ becoming ‘deadly’ (dödlig) or ‘death’ (död).

It is clear from just these few examples that Amazon didn’t use a professional translation or localisation provider for their Swedish translations and instead trusted an automatic machine translation to give accurate results.

It is a mistake that many smaller firms can’t afford to make as the potential cost from loss of brand faith and sales can be huge.

If you need a trusted translation services provider for your translation or localisation project, look no further, contact the team at Creative Word now.