Confectionery, Romanian Nationalism, and a Translation Fail

Find out what caused this embarrassing error! The answer may surprise you.

Source: Quora via Pinterest.

I hope you all had a good giggle at the above image. Perhaps you clicked on the article because it made you laugh, and you’re wondering what may have caused the oopsie. Here is one more example of the same mistake:

Source: Stirile Pro TV.

If you speak Chinese you may be wondering whether this is anything like the cursed simplified character 干 (GAN4), which caused absurdly crude English mistranslations in places like grocery stores or restaurants and gave us gems like this:

Source: Chinese Language Stack Exchange. The 干 character can mean “dry”, as in “dried vegetables”, but also “to do”, including used as a sexual slang; which may confuse automatic translation software.

Well, speakers of Romanian can tell exactly what happened. The pastries pictured in the first and second pictures contain bits of the Oriental sweet known as Turkish Delight. In Romanian the word “rahat” has two meanings: one is, indeed “Turkish Delight”, and the other one is a euphemism for, well, excrement. The reason for this actually reveals a surprising amount about the history of…