Translation seems like an easy task these days, with the help of technology such as Google at our fingertips, but it isn’t always so simple. Simple translation when trying to greet someone from another country is one thing, but interpreting major documents or treaties is another. Translators and interpreters are professionals with years of experience, but humans make errors—even computers that translate make mistakes. Bad translations can be very costly and even lead to deadly circumstances. Here are ten catastrophic translation failures throughout history.

Related: 10 Interesting Political Traditions from Around the World

10 Jimmy Carter on Poland

Jimmy Carter traveled to Poland in 1977 for a news conference, but the translation of his speech sounded like seduction. The professional interpreter, Steven Seymour, who was responsible for translating his English into Polish, made many mistakes. Carter told the people of Poland that he had “come to learn your opinions and understand your desires for the future,” but Seymour’s translation showed an erotic desire to “get to know the Poles carnally.”

Another phrase used by President Carter was “I left the United States this morning,” and it was mistranslated to say, “I left the United States, never to return.” Another translator was chosen to take over after the mishaps, but the second translator proved to be just as bad. The translator could not understand Carter’s Southern accent, so the translator made the decision to remain silent for the remainder of the speech.^[1]

9 Mars

Italian Astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli was observing Mars in 1877 when he claimed to see channels running through the planet’s surface. He used the word “canali” to describe the channels, and it was mistranslated into English as canals. Percival Lowell read about this and was convinced that the canals were real and wrote about it in the Atlantic Monthly. His writings covered the existence of Martians on Mars, due to the canals being created by them.

Several other people believed this, too, and wrote about it, and several works of fiction were inspired by these views. The water-carrying canals were just a product of misinterpretation, and most astronomers now agree that Mars does not have any channels. NASA even said, “Crisscrossing lines covering the surface of Mars was only a product of the human tendency to see patterns, even when patterns do not exist.”^[2]

8 HSBC Slogan

In 2009, The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, better known as HSBC, was getting ready to launch a $10 million rebrand of its global private banking operations after a mistranslation. HSBC is known for its memorable ad campaigns, such as the “different points of view” campaign, but its “Assume Nothing” campaign didn’t quite work as well.

The phrase “Assume Nothing” was mistranslated in several countries to mean “Do Nothing.” In December of 2024, their market cap was $174.73 billion, making them the world’s 83rd most valuable company by market cap. Doesn’t look like the bad translation was bad business, after all.^[3]

7 President Carter, Again

President Carter’s mistranslation in Poland was much worse than what happened to him in Japan, but it was once again another translation error. In 1981, the U.S. President visited a small Methodist College in the countryside of Japan to give a graduation speech. He opened with a joke, and the audience erupted into laughter after the interpreter finished speaking. Carter wasn’t expecting the joke to be so successful, and after the speech, he asked the interpreter why he received such a reaction.

The interpreter tried to dodge the question from the former president but eventually admitted that he told the crowd, “President Carter told a funny story. Everyone must laugh.” Carter said it was the best response to a joke he has ever had in his life.^[4]

6 Parker Pen

Parker has been crafting pens for more than 125 years, and they had passed the $1 million mark by 1918. The successful business produced a very unsuccessful advertising campaign when it was translated into Spanish. Parker was the first company to develop a pen that could be carried in a pocket without leaking. They used the slogan, “With no fear to be embarrassed,” and the pen sold very well.

The slogan was later rebranded to “Avoid embarrassment—use Parker Pens,” which was very successful and popular throughout the United States. The company made the decision to start selling its products in Latin America, and the slogan would need to be translated. The word “embarrassment” is a homonym for “pregnancy,” and the translation sounded something like “To avoid pregnancy, use a Parker pen.” The pens were wrongly advertised more as a contraceptive instead of a writing utensil.^[5]

5 The Waitangi Treaty

The Treaty of Waitangi was signed by more than 500 tribal chiefs in 1840. It was a written agreement between the British Crown and the Maori people of New Zealand. It paved the way for British immigration to New Zealand and established their government, but it also guaranteed the Maori rights and privileges.

The treaty was imperfectly translated into the Maori language, stating that the indigenous people would have control over the territory but would surrender the governance to the British. However, the English version demanded a surrender of authority in all its rights and privileges. The founding document remains contentious due to the difference in translations.^[6]

4 Nikita Khrushchev

In 1956, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev gave a Cold War-era speech at a reception at the Polish Embassy in Moscow. In his speech, he was interpreted as saying, “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side… We will bury you” to the Western ambassadors in attendance. The phrase was then found on the cover of magazines and newspapers around the world, especially in America. Americans considered this a threat to their country, but the words were taken out of context.

Khrushchev’s words were closer to meaning: “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will dig you in.” He was ultimately trying to say that communism would outlast capitalism. Others believe he used a more common Russian phrase, “We will be present when you are buried,” which means “We will outlast you.” Khrushchev said himself that he only meant that “socialism will inevitably succeed capitalism.”^[7]

3 Justin Trudeau Speech

Justin Trudeau’s, the Prime Minister of Canada, speech got lost in translation while speaking at the White House. Americans watching the speech from home on ABC News saw several phrases such as “Nazi innings,” “railroad stations in Motorola,” “portfolio of us old guys,” and “recourse to ice packs.” Of course, those weren’t actually the words or phrases that he said.

ABC claimed the translation mistakes were made by a computer program that was automatically translating words from French to English. The computer was unable to understand the phrases said by Trudeau, and there wasn’t an actual person controlling the translations. The speech was Trudeau’s first to a United States audience.^[8]

2 Pepsi Slogan

Some of the most popular Pepsi slogans from the past include “Be Young, Have Fun, Drink Pepsi,” “You Got the Right One Baby,” and “More Bounce to the Ounce,” but one past slogan didn’t work as well once it was mistranslated. In the 1960s, Pepsi released its new “Come Alive! You’re in the Pepsi Generation” campaign.

The campaign was going very well until it was released in China. The slogan translated to “Pepsi—Bring Your Ancestors Back From the Dead.” Of course, it was not able to bring back the dead, and the campaign was short-lived.^[9]

1 The Hiroshima Bombing

One of the most famous cases related to mistranslation is attached to the first atomic bombing. In 1945, Japan was presented with terms of a declaration of surrender by the Allied countries. Once the terms were translated to Japanese from English, it was delivered, and a response was awaited. The terms stated that any negative response by Japan would lead to “absolute destruction,” and it called for the immediate surrender from Japan. The Tokyo Prime Minister did not immediately release a statement and was assessing the situation. He was making the decision to wait before making a public official comment.

The Prime Minister used the word “Mokusatsu” to express his thoughts, which is derived from the Japanese term “silence.” The word can have several meanings, but the translation to English showed that he ignored the situation and “treated it with silent contempt.” The international news organizations published that the ultimatum was “not even worthy of comment” by the Japanese.

Americans felt as if there was no end in sight to the war, and the mistranslation may have led to the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima just ten days later. More than 150,000 people were killed as a result of the bombing, which would make it the deadliest translation error. We may never know the result if the Prime Minister’s words were translated correctly.^[10]

We rely on computers for an ever-increasing proportion of our day-to-day lives. As such, it can sometimes be hard to imagine how something so common and well-understood could ever lead to errors costing hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.

Nevertheless, severe security flaws affect almost every single device on the planet (yes, likely including the one you’re reading this on right now), and rushed designs can claim hundreds of lives. Let’s take a look at ten times computers failed—or were made to fail—in expensive, sometimes even deadly, ways.

10 Mars Climate Orbiter

The Mars Climate Orbiter was a small space probe launched on December 11, 1998, by NASA to enter Martian orbit and both study the atmosphere of the Red Planet and provide valuable insight into its climate and any surface changes that might occur. The launch went as planned, and the probe traveled toward Mars with seemingly no issues, but unknown to the mission control team on Earth, the spacecraft was being put on a trajectory that would lead to the failure of the mission.

The orbiter was being navigated by various teams of people—some who used metric units, and others who used imperial units. Due to this simple conversion error—and the misconfiguration of the computer systems on the part of Lockheed—a course correction sent the Mars Climate Orbiter far too close to the planet, and it was likely violently burned up and destroyed in the atmosphere.^[1]

9 Ariane 5

Ariane 5 is a class of heavy-lift space rocket utilized in Europe. Jointly created by 20 European nations—including Belgium, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—it has been continuously refined and altered to be more efficient, reliable, and powerful and is still in use today.

Following its initial development, the first fully completed Ariane 5 rocket lined up on the launchpad and prepared for its maiden flight on June 4, 1996.^[2] The rocket fired up the engines on both its core stage and its gigantic boosters and took to the skies, accelerating upward and beginning to turn at a much greater rate than its predecessor, the Ariane 4, as expected. Unfortunately, this was exactly why the rocket failed.

The internal computers and software responsible for monitoring speed and orientation aboard the Ariane 5 were reused from the Ariane 4, but the greater speed of the new rocket caused the computers to experience a “hardware exception” while converting a 64-bit floating point number to a 16-bit integer. Essentially, the more powerful rocket exceeded the limits of the older systems in just 37 seconds, causing the stored numbers to flip from 32,768 to – 32,768, confusing the rocket and initiating a sudden turn downward that resulted in a catastrophic breakup and aerial explosion, destroying both the rocket and its payload.

8 Knight Capital Group

Knight Capital was a American-based financial services firm buying and sharing stocks of huge value in large quantities on the global stock market. It was the dominant trader in the United States, with a share of approximately 17 percent on NASDAQ.

This all came crashing down at practically a moment’s notice on August 1, 2012.^[3] That morning, when the stock market opened, the automated computer systems based at Knight Capital began rapidly buying and selling millions and millions of shares distributed among hundreds of stocks for a total of 45 minutes, before the systems were isolated and stopped. Knight Capital was forced to sell these shares back at low prices, which resulted in a total net loss of over $440 million—or roughly $10 million per minute.

New trading software had been installed improperly on one of the computers by a technician, which caused the fault and destabilized the entire stock market for a short period. Following this debacle, Knight Capital had to be acquired by another financial firm, Getco, as the company simply lacked the money to continue and had to be “rescued” by other firms.

7 Stuxnet

Stuxnet is the name given to a piece of malware discovered in 2010 and thought to have been in joint development by the Americans and the Israelis as a cyberweapon since 2005. Targeting real-world mechanical systems, Stuxnet is generally regarded as the first known piece of malware intended to cause real-world, tangible damage.

Stuxnet appears to have mostly been employed against Iran’s nuclear program—infiltrating the nuclear facility at Natanz and infecting its computer systems, manipulating machinery in a destructive manner. It appears to have been snuck in via a simple, easily detectable USB drive, of all things. Between November 2009 and late January 2010, it is estimated that this malware caused 1,000 nuclear centrifuges—ten percent of the facility’s total number—to violently tear themselves apart by forcing changes in rotor speed.^[4] Stuxnet forced the centrifuges to first increase in rotation speed and then decrease in a highly effective attempt to cause instability. It is estimated that this destruction resulted in a 30-percent decrease in nuclear enrichment efficiency for Iran—a huge impact that undoubtedly hindered Iranian nuclear efforts.

6 WannaCry

In May 2017, a worldwide cyberattack was launched that infected Windows-based computers with ransomware. Ransomware is a form of malicious software that encrypts user data, making it unusable, and demands a payment to decrypt it and give it back to the user.^[5] WannaCry most significantly affected older Windows systems like Windows XP and spread to over 200,000 computers in 150 countries.

The ransom demanded between $300 and $600 per computer. Data was returned safely to those who paid the ransom. The United Kingdom’s National Health Service was especially badly affected, and tens of thousands of computers controlling MRI scanners, theater equipment, and more were attacked, causing some nonemergency cases to be turned away while the attack was contained. Worldwide, the cost is estimated at up to an enormous $4 billion, and the West has placed the blame squarely on North Korea’s shoulders.

5 Dhahran Patriot Missile Interception

The Patriot missile system is a United States-developed surface-to-air missile system capable of shooting down both aircraft and ballistic missiles, should they be detected and confirmed as enemy targets. It is widely employed today by both the United States and several of its allies, including Germany. It was also widely used in the Gulf War of 1991 to protect American soldiers and aircraft, which is where it failed due to a known software error.^[6]

A Patriot missile system installed in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, had been operational for 100 hours, causing its internal clock to drift by 0.34 seconds. The Israelis had detected this issue two weeks earlier and advised the US to periodically reboot the system’s computers. This was not conducted. On February 25, 1991, a “Scud” ballistic missile launched by Iraq hit the US Army barracks in Dhahran, killing 28 American soldiers. The Patriot missile system had activated and detected the missile, predicting where to look for it next—due to the drifting internal clock, the system looked in the wrong place and found no missile, so it shut down and did not attempt an intercept, which could have saved many lives.

4 Meltdown

Meltdown is a vulnerability present in all Intel CPUs released between 1995 and October 2018, as well as some ARM processors. Given that the vast majority of all computers run Intel CPUs, security analysts describe the vulnerability as “catastrophic” and initially didn’t believe the reports of the vulnerability to be true, due to how severe they were.

Meltdown exploits the way modern CPUs function and allows processes running on a computer to see all information currently being used by the CPU by avoiding security measures designed to stop this. The implications of this are terrible—someone using Meltdown to attack a computer could see passwords, sensitive financial information, images, and practically anything they wanted without users’ knowledge, all while avoiding antivirus software.^[7] Intel has released emergency security patches to fix this exploit, as has Microsoft, but this has reportedly come at a cost of performance—from five percent to a whopping 30 percent. Given how widespread this exploit is, it is most definitely destructive.

3 Spectre

Spectre is similar in nature to Meltdown. It was also uncovered in 2018, but it’s even more widespread. While Meltdown is only effective against Intel CPUs for the most part, Spectre affects practically every single computer system as of 2019. It has been reported that some variants of Spectre cannot be mitigated to any reasonable degree by software changes at all and will require hardware changes which are currently being implemented.

Spectre works by tricking a program into accessing innocent-seeming memory but actually allowing an attacker to read this data and potentially retrieve sensitive information without user approval.^[8] As of this writing, only a very small amount of CPUs are immune to this exploit—most notably the recently released AMD Zen 2 processors and Intel Ice Lake processors. Software patches, like with Meltdown, are applicable but again introduce performance drops comparable to Meltdown, in addition to causing sudden, unexpected reboots as patches are applied. It is unlikely that Spectre will disappear completely for a very long time, until hardware mitigations are employed within every single computer system—and it is likely it is affecting you right now.

2 ILOVEYOU

Starting on May, 5, 2000, tens of millions of people around the world received an e-mail with the subject “ILOVEYOU.” The e-mail generally contained a small sentence like “Please read the attached LOVELETTER from me” and would have a file attached. The file was called “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.TXT.vbs,” and millions of people opened it out of curiosity—perhaps searching for love—causing the script contained within it to activate.^[9]

The hidden script would destructively overwrite random files on the computer and automatically send a copy of itself to every single address in Microsoft Outlook, causing it to spread extremely quickly. ILOVEYOU began in the Philippines and spread to Hong Kong, Europe, and finally the US. It is estimated that the malware caused approximately $8 billion in damages worldwide and cost around $15 billion to remove from computer systems. Ten percent of all Internet-connected computers in the world were affected, and 50 million infections were reported in just a span of ten days.

1 Boeing 737 MAX

The Boeing 737 MAX is a variant of the aging Boeing 737 line of narrow-body, twin-engine passenger airliners originally developed in the late 1960s. Since then, the 737 has been routinely updated and upgraded to fit in the modern world of aviation. However, it could be argued that the 737-MAX took this a step too far.

Rushed into development and production, the 737-MAX needed greater efficiency to keep its fuel costs as low as possible. To do this, it needed larger engines that could not be traditionally mounted on its wings. As a workaround, the larger engines were mounted further forward than normal, introducing a number of differences in the way it flies. To avoid the increased cost of pilot retraining for these new characteristics, Boeing instead implemented a system known as MCAS to mitigate these differences by automatically pushing the nose of the aircraft down when excessive angle of attack is detected. It was this software acting erroneously that led to the crash of two 737 MAX flights months apart: Lion Air flight 610 in October 2018 and Ethiopian Airlines flight 302 March 2019, claiming a combined total of 346 lives as the aircraft were forced into the ground by the MCAS system. Since these two crashes, the 737-MAX has been grounded worldwide and is not allowed to fly passengers due to safety concerns.^[10]

A guy from London, writing lists on anything he finds interesting—generally something scientific or technology-based.