mistranslate

When the interpreter is a no-show, family members often jump in to fill the gap - like the time Ray mischievously stepped up to "mistranslate" his school parents' evening to his own advantage.

From BBC ● Dec. 27, 2021

I then heard the interpreter mistranslate this question into Mandarin as “Why didn’t the interpreter interpret everything?”

From The New Yorker ● Oct. 12, 2015

Emoji also tend to mistranslate when sent between platforms, or they get jumbled if you don’t have the right font.

From New York Times ● Jul. 25, 2014

Did they mistranslate “world’s largest professional network” as “professional network that people actually use”?

From Slate ● Jun. 7, 2012

To translate it as ‘machine of the world’ is to mistranslate.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton

Another popular choice is the Chinese character for “freedom,” which mistranslates to mian fei, or “free of charge.”

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 24, 2023

Lane mistranslates, "Made for her a funeral procession."

From The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night — Volume 10 by Sir Richard Francis Burton

One chunk of land was secured by one of Shehu’s lawyers in 2007 by presenting property officials a mistranslated Ottoman-era land record.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Aug. 9, 2026

But he insists the words he used in the Bashkir language mean "poor people" and were mistranslated into Russian.

From BBC ● Jan. 17, 2024

Ruhl’s plays are sometimes mistranslated from page to stage — rendered less poetic than they are, and more earthbound.

From New York Times ● Feb. 28, 2023

The article is based heavily on Chinese-language documents that appear to have been mistranslated and misinterpreted, according to Chinese language experts who have piled on via social media since its publication.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 1, 2022

This accurate description somehow got mistranslated as ‘tube’, but modern medicine seems to be stuck with the inaccurate version of the term.’

From "The Scientists" by John Gribbin

Her Asian-American critics, like Jeffery Chan and Benjamin Tong, accused her of inauthenticity, willfully mistranslating Chinese stories and customs to appeal to a white readership.

From The New Yorker ● Dec. 30, 2019

One of his interpreters confessed to frequently mistranslating his boss so as to make sense of the nonsense Arafat had spoken.

From Time Magazine Archive

Mr. Harford has transferred much of Vasari's writing to his own pages, but has succeeded in translating or mistranslating all vitality out of it.

From The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 04, February, 1858 by Various

And cites Prisot; mistranslating 'ancien scripture' into 'holy scripture.'

From Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson, Volume 4 by Thomas Jefferson Randolph

This word "charity" was one of the words that Sir Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England, charged Tyndale with mistranslating.

From The Woman's Bible by Elizabeth Cady Stanton