Common Risks in localization of OS Tools

After being absent from the PHProjekt Developer Team for about 6 weeks, I checked out the new source and logged in to PHProjekt6 this morning.
I was quite anxious to see what has happened in the meantime, but the reality surpassed my expectation by far and what I saw when opening the form view really made my day - or to precise made me laugh so hart I couldn't stop for the next ten minutes (the puzzling looks from my colleagues didn't help either )

But I guess I should start at the beginning.
Our goal was to support several languages fo the new PHProjekt6 Version. When we started the implementation we decided to provide an own language class and language adapter in the backend which is responsible for all the translation needed within PHProjekt.

As a result we started off with the frontend Implementation by taking care of all translation in the backend and sent only translated strings to the dojo based frontend. With the increasing content in PHProjekt 6 it soon became clear that we need way to many request for that solution, so we decided that we only translate the content which is provided by the database in the backend. All other strings were to be translated in the frontend.

Fortunately the dojo framework provides exactly what we needed, so when I last worked on PHProjekt one of my Spanish speaking colleagues (whom I appreciate a lot - so please do not get this wrong) was about to implement the localization in the frontend.

So when I loged in this morning what I saw was that the Save Button was translated with the German word 'Ballabwehr' which is literally translated something like 'ball defense' and actually means that in a soccer game a goalkeeper saved a ball. Now it took me sometime to realize what had happened here - my first guess was that one of my colleagues was being funny and changed the naming of the save button in appreciation of the European Football Championship which is taking place at the moment.

So when it finaly sank in that my (honestly appreciated) colleague tried to translate the english strings to German with the help of some language tools I just couldn't help to burst out laughing - apparently many language tools display 'Ballabwehr' as first result when searching for a translation for save.