Miss, Mistreated

Signing into the Avanti Trains Wi-Fi the other day, I had to enter my personal details, including my title – you know, Mr, Mrs, Miss, etc. As usual, since my phone is in portuguese, the site delivered the portuguese version of the page and this was the list I got.

My first thought was that this was some sort of data quality error – maybe they had included a couple of department names (Perda=lost property? And Recuperação de desastres= Disaster Recovery) in their list of titles and that whoever had been given the job of translating it had just translated them without thinking.

But in reflection, how would that even happen? After a couple of minutes, I realised the original list was OK, it was just a spectacularly terrible bit of AI translation.

So starting from the top:

Senhor/a Deputado/a refer to members of parliament and since that would just be one item in an English list, I assume they started out as “lord” and “lady” or something

Perda is my favourite: Miss. One of the meanings of perda is a miss or a loss.

MS must be Ms. MS does exist in Priberam as the abbreviation for a Brazilian province called Mato Grosso do Sul.

Recuperação de Desastres is the biggest leap, but since there isn’t a “Doutor” in the list, my guess is that this one started out as “Dr”, so the AI read it as “DR” and since DR stands for Disaster Recovery in management speak, it’s translated it as Recuperação de Desastres

Rev isn’t translated. Boring.

Then you’ve got Mr and Mrs and the unpronounceable Mx that a few people were trying to make happen in about 2020, much to the annoyance of everyone else.

I wonder how much the consultant charged them for this load of crap. It’s a brilliant example of what happens if you cut corners!