Google translate is a useful tool, but do take care!

Every year, the town of As Pontes de Garcia Rodriguez, in the north-western Spanish province of Galicia, organises an annual event, the Feria do Grelo, celebrating one of the local speciality vegetables, rapini, or broccoli rabe, which is a turnip-like vegetable used in regional dishes.

Web masters for the town were keen to broadcast details of this unusual festival to the wider world and drew on the resources of Google translate to help them out.

And a tiny problem arose, which was to have embarrassing consequences for the town. The Castilian Spanish version of the town’s website mistook the Galician word “rapini” (grelo) for the Portuguese word “grelo” which has a slang meaning probably unsuitable for the delicate sensibilities of the readers of this blog. Suffice it to say that the Portuguese “grelo” has a distinctively gynaecological meaning very different from the innocent vegetable it purported to describe.

We will leave readers to investigate for themselves how an innocent Spanish vegetable took on a new and vibrantly different life in Portuguese slang.

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Intrigued as to what the Portuguese slang word ‘grelo’ means?