It is simple enough so what could possibly go wrong? Order 1,500 eggs to feed the hungry Norwegian athletes at the Winter Olympics.
Then get onto Google Translate to render the order in Korean, only to have 15,000 eggs turn up.
Chefs for Norway’s Olympic team in South Korea are red-faced after ordering from a local supermarket.
The chefs blamed a translation error, but a typo might also be at fault.
Chef Stale Johansen told Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten that luckily the team were able to return the 13,500 surplus.
It is not clear how the mistake happened, but BBC Korean service journalist David Cann says Korean has a different counting system and a typo may have contributed to the confusion.
Here is the difference between the full spelling of 1,500 and 15,000 in Korean:
Tore Ovrebo, head of the Norwegian team, seems to agree. “It was an extra zero on the orders – so 1,500 to 15,000,” he said at a press conference in the South Korean city of Pyeongchang on Thursday, adding that it was “not a big issue”.
Norway has sent 109 athletes to compete at the Winter Games. The case was first reported in the country last week but only now has attracted international attention.
The Norwegians are not the only ones who have been lost in translation recently.
Last year, a Palestinian man was arrested by Israeli police after his Facebook post saying “good morning” in Arabic was reportedly mistranslated to read “attack them” in Hebrew.
And Chinese messaging app WeChat apologised after its software used the N-word as an English translation for the Chinese for “black foreigner”.