More like a bomb-egranate.
We’ve all made embarrassing language flubs while traveling abroad. However, a tourist in Portugal took the cake when he accidentally 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 trying 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 translation on a napkin and handed it to a waiter.
Little did he know, the app had accidentally 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 ground like a scene from a geopolitical thriller. They then cuff the diner and take him into custody.
The tourist was subsequently transported to a local 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 came up empty. Portugal increased the terror threat from “moderate” to “significant” earlier in October following terror incidents in Belgium in the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel.
The details of the pome-grenade language gaffe remain unclear.
However, this digital slip of the tongue could’ve been due to the similarities between “pomegranate” and “grenade” in Russian, which translate to “granat” and “granata” — a subtle distinction that may have gotten lost in translation.
It’s likely that the app translated the word to “grenada” — “grenade” in Portuguese — rather than “poma,” the local word for pomegranate.