Famous Mistranslations in History, Recreated

History's most famous translation disasters get retold constantly — the presidential speech gone wrong, the slogan that insulted a continent, the single word that may have changed a war. What nobody does is rerun them. So we did: we fed each legendary failure back through modern machine translation via Translation Mixer to answer one question — would it still happen today?

The results split cleanly into two piles: errors the machine has fixed, and errors it will happily make again, right now, for you, on demand. Some of the second pile is genuinely unsettling.

(As with everything on this site: every recreation below is real, unedited mixer output. And where a famous story is more legend than fact, we say so — some of history's best mistranslations never quite happened.)

(Looking for the mistranslations that became beloved instead of expensive? "All your base are belong to us" and the rest of gaming's Engrish pantheon get the full treatment here.)

黙殺 — The Word That May Have Ended the World (1945)

The story: In July 1945, the Allies issued the Potsdam Declaration demanding Japan's surrender. Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki told reporters the government's stance was mokusatsu (黙殺) — a famously slippery word built from "silence" and "kill." It can mean anything from "withhold comment for now" to "treat with silent contempt." International wire services translated it as Japan rejecting the ultimatum. Weeks later, Hiroshima. Historians still argue about how much weight that one word really carried — Japan's leadership was hardly one press conference away from surrender — but the U.S. National Security Agency itself has published essays on mokusatsu as the canonical example of a fatal translation ambiguity.

The recreation: We gave the machine a sentence using the word exactly as Suzuki did — 私たちはその声明を黙殺する。

Machine verdict: "We will ignore that statement."

Eighty-one years later, the machine makes the same call the wire services made: the harsh reading, stated with total confidence, no footnote about the ambiguity. If you needed the soft reading — "no comment yet" — you'd never know it existed. Error: still alive.

"We Will Bury You" (1956)

The story: At a Moscow reception in November 1956, Nikita Khrushchev told Western ambassadors "Мы вас похороним!" — translated on the spot, and in every headline after, as "We will bury you!" The West heard a nuclear threat. Sovietologists have argued ever since that the idiom meant something closer to "we will outlast you" — Marxist historical inevitability, not a shovel. Khrushchev himself later complained about the translation.

The recreation: We fed the machine the original Russian.

Machine verdict: "We will bury you!"

Same rendering, same missing nuance. And the round trip added an insult: translating it back into Russian, the machine changed the formal вас to the informal тебя — so Khrushchev is now threatening to bury one specific person, casually. Somehow more menacing. Error: still alive.

Jimmy Carter's Polish Desires (1977)

The story: President Carter landed in Warsaw in December 1977 with a freelance interpreter who proceeded to have the worst day of his professional life. Carter's "when I left the United States this morning" came out as "when I abandoned the United States." His interest in the Poles' "desires for the future" was rendered with a word suggesting he desired the Poles carnally. The Polish press had a wonderful week.

The recreation: We ran both sentences through Polish and back.

"I have come to learn your opinions and understand your desires for the future."
→ "I came to hear your opinions and understand your desires for the future."

"When I left the United States this morning…"
→ "When I left the United States this morning, I felt great sympathy for the Polish people."

Flawless. No abandonment, no lust, one minor affection/sympathy wobble. The machine comfortably out-translates the human who stood next to a president. Error: fixed.

The Horns of Moses (~405 AD)

The story: The oldest entry on the list, and our favorite. Translating Exodus 34:29, St. Jerome hit the Hebrew word קרן — which can mean "radiated" or "grew horns," because Hebrew wrote only the consonants qrn and expected you to know. Jerome chose horns: his Latin Vulgate says Moses came down the mountain cornuta — horned. A millennium later, Michelangelo sculpted his famous Moses accordingly, and horned Moseses stand in churches to this day.

The recreation: We gave the machine the Hebrew phrase and asked for Latin, then English:

Machine verdict (Latin): "Quia cornu faciei eius rubrum est."
Machine verdict (English): "Because the horn of his face is red."

Sixteen centuries of biblical scholarship, and the machine walks straight into Jerome's exact trap — horn, not radiance — and then, unprompted, paints the horn red. Moses has never looked more metal. Error: still alive (now with upgrades).

The $71 Million Word (1980)

The story: The heaviest entry, and the reason translation errors aren't just funny. In 1980, 18-year-old Willie Ramirez was brought to a Florida ER while his Spanish-speaking family repeated that he was "intoxicado" — which in Cuban Spanish usage meant they thought he'd been poisoned by something he ate. Staff heard "intoxicated," treated him as a drug overdose, and missed a brain hemorrhage. Ramirez was left quadriplegic; the settlement was roughly $71 million.

The recreation: "Creemos que está intoxicado."

Machine verdict: "We believe he is intoxicated."

The exact error, reproduced instantly. Worse: round-tripped back to Spanish, it hardened into "está ebrio" — definitively drunk. The most expensive translation mistake in medical history is one API call away, which is precisely why hospitals still need human interpreters. Error: still alive, and still dangerous.

The Marketing Department Regrets Everything

HSBC's "Assume Nothing" (2009). The bank's slogan came out as "Do Nothing" in several markets — inspiring advice from a bank — and the fix reportedly cost $10 million. We sent "Assume nothing." through French, Japanese, Turkish, Hindi, and Swahili: it came back as "Please don't rush to conclusions." Not "Do Nothing," but the slogan did dissolve into a fortune cookie, which is its own kind of brand damage. (Run it →) Error: transformed.

Parker Pen's pregnancy scare (1950s Mexico). The legend: "It won't leak in your pocket and embarrass you" was rendered with embarazar — announcing a pen that won't leak in your pocket and make you pregnant. (Well-documented as ad-industry folklore; primary sources are thin, so file under "probably embellished.") Modern verdict: "It won't spill in your pocket or embarrass you." Clean. Nobody is pregnant. Error: fixed.

"Got Milk?" (1993). When the iconic campaign considered Spanish markets, the literal translation "¿Tienes leche?" famously reads as a question about whether you're currently lactating — which is why the campaign was rewritten for Spanish-speaking audiences rather than translated. Our recreation: the machine still produces the literal "¿Tienes leche?" without hesitation. Technically correct, dairy-forward, still asking strangers about lactation. Error: still alive.

Pepsi's necromancy (1960s, allegedly). Legend says "Come Alive! You're in the Pepsi Generation" hit Chinese markets as "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead." Documentation: nearly none — it's the Bigfoot of marketing stories. Our run through Chinese returned the aggressively mild "Cheer up! You belong to Generation Pepsi." No ancestors were raised. Error: probably never existed, now definitely doesn't.

The Scoreboard

Five of eight still fail. The pattern is the one we keep finding everywhere we test: machines have gotten superb at words and remain dangerously confident about ambiguity. When a word carries two readings and the stakes are civilizational — or medical, or scriptural — the machine picks one, states it fluently, and moves on. Fluency is the trap. A clumsy translation invites doubt; a confident wrong one doesn't.

Recreate Your Own Disaster

Every chain above is one click from your own version:

→ Start with HSBC's slogan and five languages — or paste in your company's tagline and see what the machine does to it. Legal is not going to love this.

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Related: The History of Machine Translation covers how we got from Cold War rule books to today's confident guessers — including the apocryphal vodka legend. Translation Telephone: 25 Sentences That Fell Apart Spectacularly is the recreational version of this post. And Why Machine Translation Humor Works explains why we laugh at exactly the failures that terrify diplomats.