I know it's an old one but I recently came across it again and it does make me laugh. BBC NEWS | UK | Wales | E-mail error ends up on road sign In Wales all road signs have to be in English and Welsh. Welsh is spoken in many parts of Wales and almost exclusively in some parts. (It is quite difficult to understand printed Welsh as despite using the same letters, the sounds can be completely different. Check out the following; [ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language]Welsh language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame] )
This is one I heard about during the Beijing Olympics: Chinese restaurant called TRANSLATE SERVER ERROR - Boing Boing
In Queretaro, Mexico, there is a bar which had a sign, the entire three years I lived there, which read" "SORRY, WE'RE OPEN." Since it was a bar, and I don't like alcohol, I never stopped in to tell them their sign was off. Actually, since it was a bar, I thought it appropriate that they were apologizing for being open. I admit, it's not as funny as the restaurant called "Server Translate Error."
In the late 80's, I wrote Honda's dealer to distributor software for North America. While doing the French version, the 7 members of my team spoke 11 languages, none of them French. We got excellent translation help except in one Modem Menu where 'transmission speed' was translated into 'Gearbox selector', an honest mistake given the automotive background of the client. No sooner did we deploy it than the dealers admitted they wanted Onscreen language and Printer Language to be separate toggles. Some large portion of Quebec spoke English, but was required by law to do all business in French. Version 2 had separate Choices. So far as I know, no one ever told it to show French onscreen but print English.
Our products, TechDocs and Training are required to have a French option for the same reason. The firmware for one of our devices has a language option allowing you to switch it to French. Since our development team only spoke English, not all the commands were in French that were in English. Most noticeably, the command to switch back from French to English.
One time when a friend visited me at work, he watched me communicate with a computer operator. His comment was that we seemed to be communicating OK, but he had no idea what we said. There is no translation for technobabel.
