Soulard Oktoberfest Cleavage Controversy: Botched German Translation Edition

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We know nutzing about zee German translation.
Last week, Daily RFT reported on a controversial decision by Metro and JCDecaux to cancel a deal with Soulard Oktoberfest for $10,000 worth of bus stop advertising because the festival wants to promote itself with a poster that features four faux-German frauleins with big boobs and even bigger mugs of beer.

The story was a popular one -- so much so that it seems to have made its way all the way around the world to the the German motherland. Today's edition of Financial Times Deutschland features a story in their entertainment section with the headline, "US-Oktoberfest - Brust raus, Bier rein" that details the situation in St. Louis and features an interview with John McKinstry, the founder of Soulard Oktoberfest.

Just what does "Brust raus, Bier rein" mean? Good question. Hablamos Español here at RFT world headquarters, but our German vocabulary is limited to prost, pretzel and anything we picked up from repeated viewings of Inglorious Basterds. Luckily, though, the world has been blessed with an unintentional comedy goldmine known as Google Translate.

The headline, according to Google's handy tool, translates to "Chest out, Beer purely," which should definitely be the next slogan for Bud Light.

The sub-head reads, "In the U.S. Oktoberfests are more real than modest. According to liberal fest designed in St. Louis his posters. Too permissive, find the local transport - and refuse to hang the posters."

It seems the translator has imbibed one too many steins of Spaten but you can still catch the drift.

"Dress well-filled, frothy beer and the alpine scenery in the background," the story starts off, "that make Americans the right to German Gemütlichkeit."

Holy scheizer that doesn't make any sense. Reading on, though, you can make out the important details -- "four very blonde waitresses," "spectacular excerpt from dapper photo wallpaper," and "McKinstry's ladies in their daring costume Minis and seductive high heels."

Metro is called "notoriously damp transport" (we sat on that seat once too) and the Germans explain rather concisely that the agency would "rather do without the money than to risk that someone might disrupt the well-built Frolleins."

The paper concludes that, "there is really no reason to put the event into a corner with pornography," and notes -- in what might be the greatest sentence ever composed by a machine -- that the festival's attempt at removing cleavage with Photoshop was "the unloading of smaller necklines carefully situated for all cases to a nebulous veil over the Alpine idyll."

Read the whole thing in German here or click here for the Google Translated version.

Any German-speakers out there who want to take a stab at actually translating some of the key parts quoted above?

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