This is what Oswald Szemerényi (a very
lucid writer, by the way, and equally at home in Hungarian, German or English)
wrote in "Recent Developments in Indo-European Linguistics" (Transactions of the
Philological Society 1985. Oxford: Blackwell):
... But this deficiency in linguistic
knowledge [resulting from the decline of classical education -- PG] is often
combined with a certain lack of care, of conscientiousness. Thus, e.g., German
has a verb weiss 'know' and an adjective weiss 'white'. I got
a real shock when I first saw in a passage of my Einführung the verb
translated into Italian as albo; since then I have found the same
mistake in a translation into another Romance language. In both cases I have
managed to eliminate the culprit -- not to say criminal -- but both show that
the translator -- who nowadays tends to be less and less familiar with the
subject matter -- is often unable to understand the text to be translated but he
translates regardless, just for the filthy lucre.
... A number or real gems are collected in
the latest number of Indogermanische Chronik (IC 30a (1984) no. 118),
from which I gratefully cull the following. The IE root *ok- 'consider,
think over' is translated in German as überlegen. Unfortunately, the
German word can also be an adjective meaning 'superior'. The result is that
*ok- taken from a German source now appears as 'lofty'. When the IE
root *pezd- ['fart discreetly' -- PG] appears as 'cause a wind to blow
softly' one merely shakes one's head at the awkwardness of the expression; but
what should one think of the Latin verbal derivative pe:do: appearing
with the translation 'foot, furnish with feet', a fruit of ignorance matched by
equally phenomenal cheek.