AS PONTES, Spain, Nov. 4 (UPI) -- A Spanish town's celebration of the vegetable grelo, or rapini, was advertised online as a "clitoris festival" for months due to a Google Translate error.
Montserrat Garcia, a spokeswoman for the Galician town of As Pontes in the northwestern region of Spain, said the town posted an announcement for the festival online and put the Galician text into Google Translate for the Castilian Spanish version of the text.
The online translation tool changed "Feria do grelo," or "rapini festival," into "Feria clitoris," or "clitoris festival."
"Since 1981, the festival has made the clitoris one of the star products of the local gastronomy," an excerpt from the announcement reads in Spanish.
Garcia said the announcement was up for several months before officials learned of the error.
"It was quite a surprise," Garcia told the Guardian. "At first, we didn't believe what we were seeing."
Garcia said Google apparently mistook the Galician word "grelo" for the Portugese word "grelo," which refers to the same vegetable but is also an archaic slang term for the piece of female anatomy.
"We discovered that Google translates any mention of grelos, on any website, to clitoris," Garcia told The Local.
"It's a very serious error on the part of Google and we are thinking about making an official complaint for Google to properly recognize the Galician language so this kind of thing doesn't happen again," she said.
A Google representative told The Guardian the error has been corrected.
The representative said:
"Google Translate is an automatic translator -- that is, it works without the intervention of human translators, using state-of-the-art technology instead. When Google Translate generates a translation, it looks for patterns in hundreds of millions of documents to help decide on the best translation for you.
Since the translations are generated by machines, not all translation will be perfect and sometimes there will be mistakes or mistranslations. If people come across incorrect or inappropriate translations, they can let us know about them and we'll be happy to fix them as soon as possible."
