Disappointing Translations
At the Seattle Museum of Flight, we spent a particularly long time browsing around the beautiful exhibit of World War II planes.
The museum staff had meticulously restored, painted, and mounted these planes, some of them in combat configurations and angles, and supplied an effusive number of plaques with technical information about the planes, information about when and where the planes served, historical tidbits, and they also complemented the plane exhibits with displays of flight suits, cannons, ground vehicles, radios with period music and news announcements, and facilities made to look like war bunkers and so on.
The exhibit was truly awesome.
One of the more interesting aspects of planes to me was that the curators had restored each plane to look specifically like a single pilot's plane, complete with authentic nose art, kill count, and so on.
We were looking at the Messerschmidt BF109, whose nose art included what amounted to a killer chicken on one side, and windswept German text on the other.
"I wonder what kind of anti-British invective that is?" our friend remarked.
My very basic German wasn't up to the task. But Google translate was.
It turns out "Vorsicht beim Öffnen Kuhler ist im Haubenteil!" means "Caution when opening, the cowling is a heat sink!"
Oh. Good to know.
The museum staff had meticulously restored, painted, and mounted these planes, some of them in combat configurations and angles, and supplied an effusive number of plaques with technical information about the planes, information about when and where the planes served, historical tidbits, and they also complemented the plane exhibits with displays of flight suits, cannons, ground vehicles, radios with period music and news announcements, and facilities made to look like war bunkers and so on.
The exhibit was truly awesome.
One of the more interesting aspects of planes to me was that the curators had restored each plane to look specifically like a single pilot's plane, complete with authentic nose art, kill count, and so on.
We were looking at the Messerschmidt BF109, whose nose art included what amounted to a killer chicken on one side, and windswept German text on the other.
"I wonder what kind of anti-British invective that is?" our friend remarked.
My very basic German wasn't up to the task. But Google translate was.
It turns out "Vorsicht beim Öffnen Kuhler ist im Haubenteil!" means "Caution when opening, the cowling is a heat sink!"
Oh. Good to know.