Book your holiday in the concentration camp?
Interesting title isn’t it ? Sounds macabre? It is!
During my work at swoodoo.com (german only, sorry) I accidentially stumbled upon translation issues concerning the city “Kaunas” (Lithuania) on other - travel related - webpages.
The city Kaunas was translated into “KZ Kauen“.
Actually “KZ” means “Konzentrationslager” == Concentration Camp. And “Kauen” is the old “Nazi” name for Kaunas. In Kaunas was the largest concentration camp in Lithuania where the Nazis killed around 25.000 people.
Interested in a hotel in the concentration camp?
More over - and this is the reason why I post this under the “PHP” flag - I want to show how dangerous it is to copy translations from other websites. Exactly this seemed to have happend - there is a bunch of websites out there who obviously copied from the same source.
Want a cheap flight into the concentration camp?
Or interested how the weather is in the concentration camp ?
And even worse - Adwords booked on the term “KZ Kauen”
I doubt that they booked this adword, most likely it is “Dynamic Keyword Insertion”… but nevertheless quite macabre.
If you are into I18n then you should take translation serious. Quite often translated webpages simply sound silly or funny, but as you can see in this example - sometimes it can be worse.
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This is getting changed today and we’ll refer to Kaunas by its proper modern name of “Kaunas”. The name came from a shared geo database geonames.org as a German translation of “Kaunas”. So “KZ Kauen” creeped into the German site as a local name, when importing local city names. Looks like this data problem made it into quite a few other sites as well (just search google for “KZ Kauen”). I feel bad for the folks there. I’ll also see if I can remove the bad translation from geonames.org.
Kayak.com does apologize for this bad translation.
If you want get the real deal, book a trip to “FEMA Camps”
They are for real.
I guess it is hard when there is no constant check of information and in the rush to get information posted. Good on kayak.com for trying to make the changes so as not to offend any others.
I guess if it were some other word it probably wouldn’t be such a sore topic and would just be a humorous note of an error in translation but unfortunately in this case it can offend quite a few people.
Well spotted and good on you Kayak.com
Rgds
M