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HET LOO Palace, Apeldoorn, The Netherlands

#castle #castles #the netherlands #het loo

When the Translation Gets... Unexpectedly Fruity

And this, dear people of the internet, is why one should always hire a professional, or at least a native speaker to look over what translations you've cooked up with the help of some online translators.

This is from the official website of Het Loo Palace, and this little genealogical overview contains a mistake that is rather hilarious.

For all my German-proficient esteem'd readers of this post, I'm leaving the two, three smaller issues going on besides out.

Now, in German, the Dutch dynasty of rulers and the colour you get mixing red and yellow are not the same word, as, by contrast, is the case in both English and Dutch (Orange/orange and Oranje/oranje, respectively). In German, the dynasty is called (Haus) Oranien-Nassau, while the colour is orange. Now, if you capitalise the word Orange in German, it becomes a noun and means orange, as in the citrus fruit.

So the sentence Mit wem waren die Orangen verheiratet? reads as

Who were the fruits of various citrus species in the family Rutaceae* married to? *thank you, Wikipedia

Which... unfortunately makes me think of this most Jacobite of memes I ever created:

Switching to the Dutch version of the website, copying the sentence and throwing it into the slavering jowls of Google Translate reveals that this is possibly how this shoddy translation came to be in the first place:

Translate seems to recognise that Oranjes is the Dutch plural for members of the House of Orange, but doesn't seem to 'know' the correct German equivalent, Oranier, and so goes with the English equivalent, Oranges. Now, whoever read this through before publishing it on the website knew at least enough German to know that Oranges is not the plural of Orange, and corrected that to Orangen. Which is essentially correct if talking about the fruit, but not if talking about any of the many Willems listed on the website.

The correct way to phrase the sentence to eliminate any accidental fruitiness (a sore spot for some historical members of the House of Orange already) would be Mit wem waren die Oranier verheiratet?, by the way.

I am a tad amused by this (as you can tell), and debating whether I should drop them a line so they can fix this.

#history humour #lost in translation #this is why human translators matter #17th century #netherlands #het loo