Returning to the translation that triggered this thread, the translator has done it again. Kipling's words from
The White Seal:
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he met all the untrustworthy ruffians that loaf up and down the seas, and the heavy polite fish, the scarlet-spotted scallops that are moored in one place for hundreds of years, and grow very proud of it
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(e.a)
And the Hindi translation rendered back into English, with stiffly awkward fidelity
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He also found many loafer types of sea creatures who, by their smooth talk, cheat anyone and trap them somewhere in the wrong place. He found a big fish which was very kind. A (literally "1") strange balloon-shaped creature was also found, which has remained in the same place for the last hundreds of years, as if it would be named in the Guinness Book of Records
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"scarlet-spotted scallops" to "A strange balloon-shaped creature" is bad enough, imo - changing a description from colour to shape? "scarlet-spotted" is such a simple concept even I can accurately translate it into simple Hindi. Hindi has a word for scallop, "strange creature" not needed, he could always have just left it as "scallop" - as he did for "walrus".
But throwing in another extraneous anachronistic reference "Guinness Book of Records", once again simply transliterated into devanagari characters, is Picard level facepalm material. I'm only halfway through, but it's going to be hard work finishing this, as much as I was looking forward to reaching rikki-tikki-tavi.