Typically, the name of a retail product features the main descriptor, in this case, the word Parsley. Strangely enough, the small jar that we recently bought at Loblaws’ said
Dehydrated
Parsley Flakes
The French, shown immediately below, said
Persil en flocons
déshydratés
From a graphic, visual point of view, that is fine but from a linguistic one, it is not. You may have noticed that the adjective déshydratés agrees in gender and number with flacons (i.e. flakes). The problem is, it is not the flakes that are dehydrated, it is the parsley.
The resulting French is just as lame sounding as “Dehydrated flakes of Parsley”.
The right French sequence would have been
Persil déshydraté
en flocons
The symmetry with the English text is down the drain. I can see the reason why many more packages show this type of error. The in-house designer does the English layout and the French is “plugged-in” later, often without any input from a translator.
The consumer is looking for the product but cannot help noticing the “slippage” – this upsets him or her and may lead to avoiding other products of the same brand.
This is what I would call consumer retention in reverse.
