错中出错?

[Lu]

In the book I'm currently translating, a range of people is fired. One of them, a mayor, is very surprised and has no idea how that has come about. Then,

待了解，才知道前不久市里创建[big project]时，他一句话传达下去，错中出错，把一个在市政府门口静坐的妇女给关进了拘留所。

I translated this approximately as 'Eventually, he learned that it was because of a remark of his, when the city government had recently been working on realising [big project]. That remark had been passed on from one government body to the next. Mistake had been added on mistake, and a woman who had been holding a sit-in in front of the city hall had been locked up in jail.'

I thought this was correct (I changed a bit here and there for stylistic reasons), but there is also an English translation, which is so different that now I'm not sure. My questions:

- does 错中出错 mean 'mistake upon mistake, more mistakes are added to the first mistake [with a bad result]'? Or something else?

- am I right that 传达下来 here means his remark is passed from one 机构 to the next, and so on? This is what happened in a previous chapter, but the English translates it rather differently here.

- Is my translation largely correct (apart from stylistic changes)?

Thanks for any help. This is from a short chapter that's giving me a lot more trouble than it should.

[skylee]

Is it possible that it is a typo? We usually say 忙中出錯 or 忙中有錯. That would make more sense.

[Lu]

It's probably not a typo, this author does that kind of thing a lot, so that sounds like the clue I've been hoping for. And 忙中出错 means 'in his haste he overlooked something/made a mistake' right? Thank you, that should help a lot in resolving this!

[roddy]

Could you use Chinese whispers?

[Lu]

I now translated it as 'Bij die fout was een fout gemaakt' ('A mistake was made with that mistake'). Which does justice to the style I think, and gets the meaning across alright.

This book is easy to read but really hard to translate well.