Translation can be a funny thing, especially as new companies and words get added to everyday vernacular. For the last few years, after ChatGPT was unveiled by OpenAI, many had trouble learning the concept, even thinking it was called Chat “GBT.” But for the French, it has had an especially funny meaning.
Now that ChatGPT has become more known and popular, the podcast How to Kill an Hour revisited the fact that, phonetically speaking, the word has a hilariously different meaning. In one clip, host Marcus Bonzy tells his guest, “Life is extra surreal for French speakers right now because in French, ChatGPT sounds exactly like, ‘cat, I farted.’ Chatte, j’ai pété!”
Cat, I farted…
They both laugh while Bonzy continues. “That’s how you say it. So everyone on TV, in the news, people are going ‘Cat I farted,’ over and over again. With a straight face. ‘Is cat I farted gonna steal your job?’ ‘How was school, dealing with cat I farted?’ Lawyer caught using cat I farted! It’s incredible!”
Many in the comments note that other languages have this quirky issue too. (Some are a dash too dirty to relay here. Though once famously on the BBC show Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson learns that the word for “car” in Albania translates to, as he says, “gentleman sausage,” which the crew found brilliant.)
One Instagrammer shares, in French (translated here), that what they’re saying is true. “Yes, it’s true! We still say ‘chatte’ to make it sound more serious, but for GPT, I farted, we couldn’t do anything!”
On Facebook, under the same clip, one French speaker notes that it’s even more specific. “Now a little context. Chatte is a term of endearment meaning ‘female cat.’ So it means, ‘My dear, I farted,’ as one would say to their female acquaintance.”
Happens in many languages
Another commenter adds that this is far from the first time this has happened. “The poor guys who drive a Toyota MR2. MR2 (sounds) like ‘merde,’ that means ‘turd’ in translations.”
This Facebooker explains how they’ve gotten around some phonetic mishaps. “When I worked for GPT 40 years ago, we called ourselves GPTelecom in France. True story!”
A grandparent weighs in. “‘J’ai pété’ is one of the first French sentences I taught my two-year-old American grandson. And he knows what it means, so when he makes a ‘butt noise,’ that’s what he says now.”
Many point out that the French don’t pronounce the ‘T’ at the end of chat, but they concede that the GPT part is hard to deny. “It’s not true for ‘cat.’ We don’t pronounce ‘chat’ the same way that we pronounce ‘cat’ in French. But it true for the GPT equaling J’ai pété or ‘I farted.’ LOL.”
Another jokes, “And this is why in my family, we have renamed the AI tool, The Farty Cat.”
Italian examples
Again, of course, French isn’t the only language in which this happens. An entire Subreddit r/linguistics discusses how often this happens. One Redditor shares the different meanings behind the same phonetic sounds in Japanese and Italian. “‘Nani’ means ‘what’ in Japanese and ‘dwarves’ in Italian. ‘Matte’ means ‘wait’ in Japanese and ‘crazy ‘(pl. f.)” in Italian. ‘Anime’ means…well we all know what anime is, but in Italian it means ‘souls’. ‘Ao’ means ‘blue’ in Japanese and it’s a super common interjection (similar to ‘hey!’) in Rome.” ‘Souka’ means ‘I see/is that so’ in Japanese and it sounds like a Sicilian swearword.”
They also point out Italian and Arabic differences. ‘Ma’ means ‘what’ in Arabic and ‘but’ in Italian. ‘La’ means no” in Arabic and ‘the (sing. f.)’ in Italian, and it’s also the name of the A note. ‘Ma’kulat’, Arabic for ‘food’ sounds like ‘maculato’, ‘spotted’ in Italian. There are definitely more but these are some just off the top of my head.”
