Don’t Wait For the Translation!

"Traduttore, traditore," say the Italians. "Translator, traitor." Translation and interpreting are certainly black arts, and combat-hardened practitioners trade horror stories about past gaffes like hockey cards. Eliminating these "humbugs" is crucial to diplomacy and international business, as a few cautionary tales make plain.

Many historically-significant snags can be traced to wilful mistranslations by rival interests. An early example is Man Afraid of His Horses, a Hunkpatila Lakota leader who was saddled with this insult for posterity when a white chronicler failed to do his homework. Apparently, in Lakota, They Fear His Horse (the chief's real name) is easily transposed into the sarcastic gibe now embedded in history. When the stranger recorded an adversary's translation without corroboration, he condemned They Fear His Horse to eternal ridicule.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev was similarly slandered in 1956 when he crowed "We will bury you!" in a speech to Western leaders. Evidently, an interpreter unfamiliar with this Russian cliché translated it literally; a more accurate interpretation is "We will outlive you." Given the political climate of the times, Westerners were only too happy to view Khrushchev's idle boast as a frightening if nebulous threat, and as such it is remembered to this day.

The same era saw John F. Kennedy declare "Ich bin ein Berliner!" at the Berlin Wall. "I am a Berliner" is what he meant, and most listeners accepted it as such. However, the word "ein" introduces a measure of ambiguity to the statement; it could also mean "I am a jelly doughnut". This has lead to no end of jokes in the intervening years. (My favourite: a Hamburg resident, weary of American tourists constantly chirping "Ich bin ein Berliner!" at him, mutters, "Ja, und ich bin ein Hamburger!") Avoiding distracting double entendres of this sort is another of the interpreter's responsibilities.

The textbook example of American attitudes toward foreign languages and the importance of translation also dates from the fertile brinkmanship period. Who can forget UN ambassador Adlai Stevenson thrusting an incisive question at his Soviet counterpart and snapping, "Don't wait for the translation! Yes or no!" (The Russian, to his credit, laughed... when the translation came over his earpiece.)

Twenty years later, US President Jimmy Carter made headlines when he permitted a family friend to act as his interpreter in Poland. The Polish American evidently hadn't learnt as much from his grandmother as he believed; at various points the crowd responded to the president's address in a fashion better suited to stand-up comedy. In the defining moment of the humbug-riddled speech, Carter assured the Polish that he was sexually aroused for each of them.

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