Who the heck is RantWoman to be advising all the foreign ministers of the world? Who indeed!
Memo to foreign ministers everywhere:
1. Use a real translator, not Babelfish, Google translate, "contract linguists" or whatever it was that generated peregruzka when perezagruzka was needed.
2. If your counterpart hands you a button with a mistranslation of
what she says she meant to say, try to correct her with the correct
translation of what she actually said. Peregruzka is overload like
electrical overload which is possibly in the same mental universe as
overcharge on the Russian side but definitely not in English RantWoman leaves to readers with a lexicographic bent the task of further research about the usage here in English.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sudCmrAsF4&feature=related
RantWoman realizes that the tale of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "overloading" US/Russian relations when she meant to reset them is old news. It's not quite as old as, say, President Carter's interpreter reporting that the President lusted after the Polish people, but still.
RantWoman is pretty selective about the media streams she bathes regularly in. Until RantWoman received the item here on an interpreter's mailing list, she had not realized that the mis-transated reset came with a mistranslation on the other side of the conversation too.
No wonder international relations are so difficult sometimes.
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RantWoman's email brings fascinating further tidings on this topic.
ReplyDeleteIf Secretary Clinton had wanted to "reset relations" she might have used the more standard politics domain Russian phrase "vosstanovlenie otnoshenii." Email about this included the literalism "relationships" rather than "relations." RantWoman spent a minute being led astray about points when something is singular in one language and plural in the other but then decided that there would be better examples for noodling about that issue.
Next, another interpreter posted that if Secretary Clinton wanted to "reset" relations, enough people of the IT age would understand the concept of "rebooting" even though then she would need the word "sbros" rather than either the one on her button or the one Foreign Minister Lavrov proposed.
But Foreign Minister Lavrov is not necessarily in command of his language either. Old Russian battery technology could indeed be overcharged but the word for that would be "perezaryadka." Foreign Minister Lavrov probably has little experience arguing with Customer Service in the US, but in the US "overcharged" usually exists in the financial rather than electrical domains.
Fun, Fun, Fun for all