The city of Ottawa is holding a metaphorical “L” after missing a literal one.
As Canada’s CTV reports, the city had put up signs around the Centretown neighborhood promoting its Street Seats program that read “Placettes Pubiques” in French. Presumably, they were meant to say “Placettes Publiques,” which, when translated from French, means “Public Squares.”
However, without the very important “l” in “publiques,” the word translates to “pubic” instead of “public,” which, of course, has a very different meaning.
“This was an unintentional translation error that made its way into production,” Sabrina Lemay, the executive director of the Centretown BIA, tells CTV. “As soon as we became aware of it, we took steps to have it corrected.”
All hail the power of the single letter.