A Tory MP has apologised after her website used a dodgy Welsh translator which offered its constituents medical surgery.
Virginia Crosbie’s Welsh language version also turned factories into vegetables and referred to knitters as waste pipes.
It came after the Ynys Môn MP used a machine translator instead of employing a fluent speaker.
The headline “2 sisters plant will pay full pay to workers” has been translated into “Bydd 2 chwaer-blanhigyn yn talu cyflog llawn i weithwyr” which means “two sister-vegetations will give workers full pay”.
It also translated an “amazing team of sewers” – people that sew – into “tîm anhygoel o garthffosydd” – the underground conduit for carrying off drainage water and waste matter.
And constituents were offered medical surgery – “llawdriniaeth” – rather than a surgery meeting with the MP to discuss their concerns.
The site was translated using the Microsoft Translator Tool which made a number of mistakes.
Drawing attention to the errors on Twitter, Wrexham Plaid Cymru councillor Marc Jones commented that Virginia Crosbie “seemed to have translated the site using a potato”.
He added: “@WelshConserv MP is having a mare with the Google Translate.”
The Conservative MP, who was born in Essex, committed to learning Welsh before being elected as Ynys Môn’s representative at Westminster in December’s general election.
But, judging by the errors, she doesn’t appear to have grasped the basics.
Ms Crosbie is currently the only Conservative MP who has Welsh language news content on her site.
The websites for the Conservative MPs for Wrexham, Clwyd South, the Vale of Glamorgan, Monmouth, the Vale of Clwyd, Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire, Brecon and Radnorshire, Aberconwy, Delyn, Bridgend, and Montgomeryshire do not feature Welsh language translation.
The website of David Jones of Clwyd West is available in Welsh but the news content is untranslated.
Ms Crosbie only sits on a wafer-thin majority of 1,968 (5.4%). Before her victory it had been represented by a Labour Party MP since 2001.
In February the former maths teacher was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to the Department of Health and Social Care.
She has also been a member of the Welsh Affairs Select Committee and Women and Equalities Committee since March.
In a tweet, Ms Crosbie said: “Thank you for your patience.”
“While I have started learning the Welsh language, I am sorry that the automatic website translation is not 100% perfect.”
She added: “We’re currently working on a fully bilingual website.”
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