Mistranslations can be forgivable. We still manage to have it happen often in the present day. Today, however, our means of communication are much faster, and so we can correct ourselves/ be corrected by others much earlier than before. This wasn't the case in the late 1800's when an Italian astronomer believed he had found naturally formed waterways on the surface of Mars. What was written was the word "canali," and it had been mistranslated into "canals" in the early 1900's, suggesting that these waterways were man-made. Luckily it only took a few decades to spot this mistranslation.
We all know today thanks to the many different satellites and rovers we have sent towards the red rock that the only water on its surface is the ice caps on its poles. All that dots the planet is craters and cracks. Maybe one day humans would be able to make some canals on the planet, but that could take decades of terraforming, a technology and process we have yet to figure out step 1 in.
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