Poetry in Translation

The Hungarian Phrasebook returns! All you Monty Python fans will recall the brilliant Hungarian Phrasebook skit, involving a hapless Hungarian tourist in London encumbered with a shockingly faulty phrase book. "I weesh to fondle your buttocks?" he enquires of a bobby. The skit is also the source of the truly sublime phrase, "My hovercraft is full of eels." But did you know that the skit is based on a true story? Someone produced a phrase book for a language with which he was unfamiliar. He had a dictionary for the source language (which may very well have been Hungarian) to French, then French to German, and then German to English. The results were fantastic, including "Scritch the marmoset" (listed under Polite Expressions).

As a lover of language, I know how difficult it is to take fairly prosaic technical material and make it correct in another language, but I am completely in awe of the talent and art applied by professional translators of literature and poetry. How do they do it? We all know that CAT (computer-assisted translation) is flawed; idioms and colloquialisms are always difficult. Some of the more well-known examples are:

Out of sight, out of mind.
(After translation to Mandarin Chinese and back again) Invisible, insane.

The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.
(After translation to Russian and back again) The vodka is good but the meat is spoiled.

Now there's a Google hack of an online version of Poetry in Translation. Type in a sentence, a line of poetry, or a common expression, and watch the fun begin. The site translates the text into German, then translates that into French, and then translates the results back into English. My best attempt earned me:
A stone of role does not seize foam. (A rolling stone gathers no moss.)

I've always appreciated wacky translations and have gathered a collection of bloopers from signs, menus, product packaging, and even instruction manuals. Most Anglos here have at some time been able to order a "difficult egg" for breakfast (the Hebrew word kasheh means both hard and difficult), or seen such gems as "milk jam" or "king's nuts." A menu in Italy once boasted "apple creeps" and a colleague once reported seeing "dreaded veal cutlets" in China.

So the challenge is on: send me your own picture (not something you found on the Internet) of a sign, menu, or whatever, with wacky English or a bad translation, and if I can use it in a presentation, you can win a prize. Really!