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New Zealand Mail, 27 August 1902, Page 54 (Supplement)

Some amusing errors are made by translators. An Italian paper turned Kipling’s “Absent-Minded Beggar’ into a * “Distracted Mendicant.” Another Italian editor, who translated a passage from an English paper about a man who had killed his wife with a poker, added an ingenious foot note to say: “We do not know with certainty whether this thing ‘pokero,’ he a domestic or surgical instrument.” The desperate expedient of the French translator of Coopers •Spy.” who had to explain liow a horse could be hitched “to a locust,” is worth recalling. He had never heard of locust trees, and rendered the word by “sautorelle.” or grasshopper. Feeling that this needed some explanation, he appended a footnote explaining that grasshoppers grew to a gigantic size in the United States, and that it was the custom to place a stuffed specimen at the door of every mansion for the convenience of visitors, who hitched their t-jx sit.