We released a React application two weeks ago and had some great feedback on the project. Several newspapers wrote about it, we also had some online coverage, many visitors and also users who signed up.
The wired thing was, that about 1.5 weeks later a journalist wrote about the project and he complained in his article that our language was really bad. He pointed out two sentences. In one the German word "schnapp" (means grab) was exchanged for "Schnaps" (which is booze) and another one where "Gründen" was changed to "gehören".
I did some review of the source file and we never had these words in our git history of the file. He told us that he is using Chrome (no version mentioned). The only thing out of the ordinary was that we had in our markup the lang attribute set to English ``. After changing only that one attribute to German he reported to us one day later that the issue was fixed.
So the only thing I can think of is some Chrome translation or auto correct feature or plugin changing the text from German to German.
Did anyone ever encounter something like this?
"When Google recognizes that the contents of a page are not in the language that the user is likely to want to read, Google often provides a link to a translation in the search results. In general, this gives you the chance to provide your unique and compelling content to a much larger group of users. However, there may be situations where this is not desired. This meta tag tells Google that you don't want us to provide a translation for this page."