Lava is probably not among the first things you associate Switzerland with, yet we have torrential lava in the Canton of Valais. Allegedly. "Lave torrentielle", the French phrase that caused ruckus. Our national alerting system flagged an area of Valais as in danger of debris flow. The original message was in French, reading "Suite à une lave torrentielle en continu, le Haut val de Bagnes depuis Champsec et Sarreyer est fermé à la circulation." In the app (and also on the website), the alerting system is using machine translations for those who don't understand french; unfortunately the translation service decided that the most probable translation of the French phrase is to go the literal way, translating word by word, "torrentielle" becoming "torrential" and "lave" "lava". And thus we got "Following continuous torrential lava, the Haut Val de Bagnes from Champsec and Sarreyer is closed to traffic" in English, and similar translations in other languages which appear to be fixed at this point (at least in German and Italian). Moral of the story: check your machine translations. While this case was benign, we've all seen worse translations, some that can even be damaging to your site's reputation, conversions, or worse, people relying on your site.
John Mueller
2w
Lava - so hot right now.
Haha, who knew Switzerland harbored a secret volcano lair?
Analyst at Google
2wmore: https://www.watson.ch/digital/apps/651060500-alertswiss-app-warnt-vor-vulkan-ausbruch-im-wallis-das-steckt-dahinter