26 April 2023 , 14:08
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A Welsh national park appeared to accidentally discover milk trees and launch a fire festival.
Despite sharing a lengthy border and entwined history, the vast majority of English people do not understand Welsh.
In the age of Google translate and thanks to the broadly bilingual Welsh population, this fact rarely causes an issue, the Daily Post reported.
However, in recent months software which was easing translations between the two languages has been spewing out some confusing statements.
Eryri National Park recently revealed the discovery of a new fictitious arctic-alpine plant called Devil’s Glare as an April's Fool joke.
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The new name for the Brecon Beacons was translated as 'Brexit' (Hand-out)But for English speakers following Welsh-language posts on Facebook, the translation the park's page offered was a little confusing and somewhat ruined the joke.
Instead of being found in "moist crevices", Devil’s Glare – scientific name Aprilis babilus – was reported to be hanging from “milk trees”.
As far as anyone knows, milk trees have yet to be identified in Eryri, casting the joke into the realm of the overly surreal.
Just last week the translation machine sprites struck again, describing the park not as a "Dark Sky Reserve" but a “well-known Evil Sky Protector”.
Later Facebook translated Eryri - the new, Welsh name for the Snowdonia National Park - as "stupidity", which wasn't a particular sensitive mood amid a national language debate.
Seeing this, Eryri National Park stepped in to set the record straight.
“Hi guys,” it commented. “Facebook does have a tendency to unfortunately mistranslate our posts from time to time! We have sent some feedback for them!”
Analysis of national park posts over the past months reveals other howlers.
Plas Tan y Bwlch, the park authority’s environmental studies centre at Maentwrog, was confused as the “Bwlch Fire Festival”.
On Monday the park hosted a local business event to discuss its clean-up bid to make Yr Wydda the “first plastic-free mountain in the world”.
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Facebook produced an unfortunate mistranslation of Eryri, now the adopted name for Snowdonia (Hand-out)Facebook saw it as “the launch of the “Plastic Snowdon” business plan.
In 2021, Facebook made another error when Eryri national park apparently asked visitors if they were coming to the Ogwen “sex area”.
Its AI translation software was thrown by the word “rhyw” - which as a stand-alone word can mean sex.
A spokesperson for the national park said: “‘We would like to thank the public and North Wales Live for bringing these mistranslations to our attention.
"This has not been the first time that Facebook’s automatic translation service has unfortunately mistranslated some of our posts.
"This is an issue that is outside of the authority’s control and we will be contacting the platform with feedback and will be asking to correct them.”