A mistranslation led to a bomb scare in Lisbon, with police mobilized and an Azerbaijani man briefly arrested and interrogated after being forced to lie facedown on a street while he was being handcuffed.
The whole kerfuffle started when the man, a Russian-speaker, gave a waiter a note translated by his language app, asking (he thought) for pomegranate juice, while the waiter saw the Portuguese word for grenade, thought the man was making a threat and called police.
The incident may have been caused by the similarity between the two words for “pomegranate” and “grenade” in Russian: “granat” and “granata”. However, the distinction between the two in Portuguese – “poma“ is the word for pomegranate and “grenada” the word for grenade – may not have come across in the translation app.
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