America-Israel Patent Law Blog

I think anyone who works in more than one language has stories about “machine generated” translations.  One of my favorites is one that appears on restaurant menus in Israel: it’s common for the menu to include the legend, ללא חשש ערלה, which means that kosher-conscious customers need not worry that the fruits served by the establishment were harvested from the tree in its first three (in practice, four) years after planting.  See Leviticus 19:23.  But the word ערלה also has another meaning, and that’s the one you’ll get if you plug the above phrase into Google translate:

Yes, some restaurants have this on their English menus. 

Lawyers are not immune to this phenomenon.  Recently an ad ran in the print edition of the Jerusalem Post.  It was meant to be an alternative form of service of process to a litigant who couldn’t be found.  The Hebrew term for “service of documents” is המצעת מסמכים, which is pronounced “hamtza’at mismachim”.  The Hebrew word for “invention” is pretty close: אמצעה, which is pronounced “amtza’ah”.  You can see where this is going…

I guess that’s one way to invent something.