Spanish town accidentally promotes ‘Clitoris Festival’

by Original Quill Wed Nov 04, 2015 3:56 pm

Thanks to a Google Translate error, the town of As Pontes in Galicia, Spain, went to great lengths to advertise its annual rapini vegetable festival as the “Clitoris Festival.”

“The clitoris is one of the typical products of Galician cuisine,” read the town’s website. “Since 1981, the festival has made the clitoris one of the star products of the local gastronomy.”

[Generally cherished as a pre-feast hors d'oeuvre.]

So where did Google Translate go wrong?

Rapini (we call it broccoli rabe) is a leafy green used in Mediterranean dishes. The Galician word for rapini is grelo. The clitoris is a highly sensitive part of female genitalia. Portuguese slang for clitoris is grelo. Google Translate chose the Portuguese over the Galician when converting the website copy to Spanish.

“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,” town hall spokeswoman Monserrat García told The Local.

There actually is something called the CLIT Fest in New Brunswick, N.J. [home of Rutgers University] CLIT (Combating Latent Inequality Together) FEST is a three-day DIY festival that seeks to actively combat sexism, homophobia, transphobia, racism and other forms of discrimination, and has nothing to do with broccoli.

The Galician Rapini Festival will be held on Feb. 15, 2016. Attendance this year will probably be up. Way up.