As some may recall I made this post about the Balenciaga company, and how Google Translate had the word "Balenciaga" defined as meaning "Baal is the king". This translation had gone viral, as I was seeing it come across my YouTube feed. I went and checked it myself and it sure did have the translation as Baal is the king, but as you will see in the comments section of that post I made, the translation proved to be wrong, and the reasons for how this could have happened are outlined there.
h/t to u/FractalizingIron and all the other frens who called it out! I deleted the OP so it wouldn't remain on the front page and dupe more people but figured I'd make this post to give a reference back to the comments for the lesson.
TLDR: Don't blindly trust online translators or any other AI, and go read the comments in that deleted post if you haven't.
I thought it was "Do what you want" = Do what thou wilt. That still works in google translate.
KEK, I tried different groupings of letters and got "Balls in a bowl" in an African language.
LMAO
All I can find is that first, that is the surname of the founder, Spanish version of the Basque surname Balentziaga, and according to English Basque dictionary balea means whale. If you look "meaning of Spanish surnames" you find the explanation that the whole name would mean "house of whalers".
According to some of the family sites I looked at there should currently be about 400 people with the Spanish version of that surname, most in Spain, so it's somewhat rare, so presumably it would have been possible to change those sites. Still seems somewhat unlikely, trying to ridicule people who jump at the "Baal" explanation without checking much perhaps more likely, as at least it would be easier.
Ba'al BTW just means, like many of those old god names, "lord" or "owner". So if we assume the translation would be from some other language, like that dead Semitic one the worshippers of that god used, not the claimed Latin (which it can't be as in Latin king is Rex) you might get "lord/owner is king".
https://www.familysearch.org/en/surname?surname=Balenciaga
https://forebears.io/surnames/balenciaga
https://www.ancestry.co.uk/name-origin?surname=balenciaga
Hm. Baal seems to also been identified by some people as the same god as Zeus. "The worship of Baal was popular in Egypt from the later New Kingdom in about 1400 bce to its end (1075 bce). Through the influence of the Aramaeans, who borrowed the Babylonian pronunciation Bel, the god ultimately became known as the Greek Belos, identified with Zeus."
So it doesn’t mean baal is king?
nope, but I still think the people at that company are Moloch Baal worshiping devils!
Don't need google translate or a pokemon card to figure that one out!