Hillary's Russian Translator
Last week, the world was abuzz when Hillary Clinton, the new US Secretary of State, presented her Russian counterpart with a Reset Button that was famously mis-translated. Instead of reset, the word used means to Overload or Overcharge.
What an outrage! Americans don’t understand other languages! We’ve known this for years! What’s your (or, rather, since I am an American and proud of it) our problem?!
As translators, let’s try to take this problem apart. How wrong is the translation? Is it completely off-the-mark, or is there a misunderstanding somewhere?
First of all, it should be pointed out that the word is not even in Cyrillic, the Russian alphabet. This is clearly not intended to be a serious piece of work, just a throw-away media piece. The target translation is to create the same meaning in Russian as the word “RESET” does in English, as applied to videogames, stop watches and computers. The word actually used was “ПЕРЕГРУЗКА”, which has a normal meaning of ‘overcharge’ (as in overcharge a battery) or ‘overload’. It also has a lesser meaning of ‘reset’ when used as a programming term.
The word that would best be used here is clearly “ПЕРЕЗАГРУЗКА”. The difference here is only two letters.
Members of our Russian team came back with a couple of possible explanations:
- The translator was not given sufficient context for the translation. If the translator thought this was for a specialized software programming application, he/she might have unintentionally used this word.
- There is a slight chance that this was a manufacturing error. If the designer of the button saw the there was not enough space for the real translation, he/she might have looked in a dictionary or online for a variant and found the incorrect word. Incidentally, Russian-English and English-Russian dictionaries are INFAMOUSLY inconsistent or outright wrong on many words. I had a Russian professor who could tell exactly which dictionary you had used on your homework by your word choice.
One thing everyone agrees is that no one reviewed Hillary’s translation. It was done by one person, and then never reviewed by a qualified native speaker of Russian. All translations need to be reviewed, it’s that simple. Particularly when it’s important.
Is this an apocryphal story of American understanding of foreign languages? I think so. It is true that fewer Americans than Europeans speak second languages, but this is common in large countries where people rarely meet people who speak different languages. Russia and China are other typical examples.
In fact, if one counts by absolute numbers of foreign language speakers, I imagine the US has the largest number given its extremely large number of immigrants. 33 million people living in the US are foreign born, according to official accounts (which are probably undercounting). More than 25% of the official population of California was born outside of the US.
In my mind, I imagine the problem has more to do with the insular nature of high office in the State Department. The State Department (along with the NSA, Defense and the CIA – in roughly that order) is one of the premiere posts for language experts in the US. I imagine that the upper offices at Foggy Bottom (as the State Department is known) decided to bypass their world-class translation offices and just gave this to a friend who spoke Russian as a second language. It shows.
(Thanks to Nikita, Alex and Sergey for their help with this post.)