Lost in translation, although a nice title for this series, is sometimes literally what happens upon changing text between two languages. When my family visited the torture museum in Santillana del Mar (what. . . . there was nothing else to do in that tiny town), a plaque explained in English that a particularly menacing torture device was used for the “annihilation of stubboons and protestants.” Stubboons, perhaps a particularly ornery breed of anarchists. As this isn’t even close to a Spanish cognate, I can only guess that an attempt to spell stubborns went awry, although that itself isn’t even a word in English. The translators went 0 for 2 on that one. Another disturbing mechanism clamped onto a miscreant woman’s chest, destroying her parts so much that she could no longer “give breast milk to her creatures,” a practice made all the more visually disturbing by the incorrect translation. In Spanish, criaturas means babies, but the mistaken translation to English makes me picture a woman breastfeeding hungry goblins.In my Contrastive Linguistics class, my professor warned us of such mistakes. He said that he once visited a restaurant with the typical Spanish plate “rape a la marinera,” a kind of fish with red sauce. In the English menu, the writers kept the type of fish—rape—the same, but detailed how it was prepared, so the dish was translated “Rape sailor style.” I’ll venture to say it wasn’t a favorite among the British tourists.These mistranslations go both ways, though. We English-speakers are just as guilty of mistakes, like an ad for an airline’s first-class seating that tried to translate too literally the phrase “Fly in Leather.” The direct translation, “volar en cueros,” just happens to include a Spanish idiom, “en cueros,” which means naked. So instead of suggesting that people fly in luxury, the airline suggested that people take trips in the nude. It would be interesting to see if ticket sales went up after the advertising campaign—perhaps the idea of a little freedom while flying really attracted people.