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ARCHAEOLOGY

Galicia town to take action against Google Translate over ‘clitoris’ gaffe

A Galician town whose website ended up promoting a "clitoris festival" when translated by Google, is considering making an official complaint to the company.

Published: 3 November 2015 09:24 CET
Galicia town to take action against Google Translate over 'clitoris' gaffe
Photo: Ralf Roletschek / Wikimedia

“We think that it is a serious error and believe that Google should recognize the Galician language,” Monserrat García, spokeswoman for As Pontes town hall, told The Local on Monday evening after the story went global.

One of the highlights of the year in the town of As Pontes in Galicia, northwestern Spain, is its annual rapini festival, when townsfolk celebrate the town's speciality, the leafy green vegetable similar to spinach. 

But when residents clicked to read the town’s website in Castillian Spanish – provided by Google Translate – to check the dates for next year’s fest, they were shocked to discover the new adult themed turn the festival had taken.

“Google translate recognized our Galician word grelo as Portuguese and translated into the Spanish clítoris,” explained García to The Local. 

So instead of promoting the Feira do grelo (Rapini Festival) the website ended up advertising a much more X-rated affair – the Feria Clítoris (Clitoris Festival).

“The clitoris is one of the typical products of Galician cuisine,” read the description of the festival in the Castillian Spanish version of the town hall’s website, whose original version is written in Galician. 

The mistake, which was corrected last Thursday according to La Voz de Galicia, is due to the fact that in Portuguese, grelo is an archaic slang term for the clitoris.

Google did not recognize the writing on the website as Galician and instead translated the term from the Portuguese.

While the mistake might seem funny – and a cautionary tale about trusting online translators – As Pontes town hall is taking it more seriously.

“It’s a very serious error on the part of Google and we are thinking about making an official complaint for Google to properly recognize the Galician language so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again,” Garcia told The Local.

Galician is an official language in the northwestern region of Galicia, along with Spanish, where over 2.4 million people speak the regional tongue.

It is closely related to Portuguese, which could explain how Google ended up translating an innocent leafy vegetable as something altogether different.

Rapini is a staple of Galician cuisine and is also a common ingredient in Italian and Portuguese dishes. It is a subspecies of turnip and is the southern European equivalent of 'turnip tops' or 'turnip greens' and in the US is known as broccoli raab or broccoli rabe.

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ARCHAEOLOGY

Study confirms ancient cave art in southern Spain was created by Neanderthals

Neanderthals, long perceived to have been unsophisticated and brutish, really did paint stalagmites in a Spanish cave more than 60,000 years ago, according to a study published on Monday.

Published: 3 August 2021 09:13 CEST
Study confirms ancient cave art in southern Spain was created by Neanderthals
Photo: Joao Zilhao/ICREA/AFP

The issue had roiled the paleoarchaeology community ever since the publication of a 2018 paper attributing red ocher pigment found on the stalagmitic dome of Cueva de Ardales (Malaga province) to our extinct “cousin” species.

The dating suggested the art was at least 64,800 years old, made at a time when modern humans did not inhabit the continent.

But the finding was contentious, and “a scientific article said that perhaps these pigments were a natural thing,” a result of iron oxide flow, Francesco d’Errico, co-author of a new paper in the journal PNAS told AFP.

A new analysis revealed the composition and placement of the pigments were not consistent with natural processes — instead, the pigments were applied through splattering and blowing.

(Photo by JORGE GUERRERO / AFP)

What’s more, their texture did not match natural samples taken from the caves, suggesting the pigments came from an external source.

More detailed dating showed that the pigments were applied at different points in time, separated by more than ten thousand years.This “supports the hypothesis that the Neanderthals came on several occasions, over several thousand years, to mark the cave with pigments,” said d’Errico, of the University of Bordeaux.

It is difficult to compare the Neanderthal “art” to wall paintings made by prehistoric modern humans, such as those found in the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave of France, more 30,000 years old.

But the new finding adds to increasing evidence that Neanderthals, whose lineage went extinct around 40,000 years ago, were not the boorish relatives of Homo sapiens they were long portrayed to be.

The cave-paintings found in three caves in Spain, one of them in Ardales, are throught to have been created between 43,000 and 65,000 years ago, 20,000 years before modern humans arrived in Europe. (Photo by JORGE GUERRERO / AFP)

The team wrote that the pigments are not “art” in the narrow sense of the word “but rather the result of graphic behaviors intent on perpetuating the symbolic significance of a space.”

The cave formations “played a fundamental role in the symbolic systems of some Neanderthal communities,” though what those symbols meant remains a mystery for now.

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