More like a bomb-egranate.
We’ve all made embarrassing language flubs while traveling abroad. Nevertheless, a tourist in Portugal took the cake when he by accident caused a bomb scare by mistranslating the local word for “pomegranate.”
The mother of all translation errors occurred Friday evening while the 36-year-old unnamed Russian speaker from Azerbaijan was attempting to order fruit juice at a restaurant in Lisbon, local media reported.
Things backfired after he tried to translate the seed-filled desert fruit’s name into Portuguese using a language application, the Telegraph reported. He then wrote the interpretation on a napkin and handed it to a waiter.
Little did he know, the app had by accident regurgitated the word for grenade, causing the panicking staffer to interpret the note as a bomb threat and call the police.
Accompanying footage from local media shows five officers approaching the hapless traveler with their guns drawn as he lies prone on the bottom like a scene from a geopolitical thriller. They then cuff the diner and take him into custody.
The tourist was subsequently transported to a neighborhood police station for interrogation, whereupon he was later released after it was found he didn’t have any weapons. Authorities scoured his hotel room and inspected the restaurant as well.
Lisbon police also searched their database and consulted the country’s counterterrorism unit, but their searches got here up empty. Portugal increased the fear threat from “moderate” to “significant” earlier in October following terror incidents in Belgium within the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel.
The small print of the pome-grenade language gaffe remain unclear.
Nevertheless, this digital slip of the tongue could’ve been attributable to the similarities between “pomegranate” and “grenade” in Russian, which translate to “granat” and “granata” — a subtle distinction which will have gotten lost in translation.
It’s likely that the app translated the word to “grenada” — “grenade” in Portuguese — relatively than “poma,” the local word for pomegranate.