Lost In Translation

General discussion about learning languages
Skynet
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Lost In Translation

Postby Skynet » Fri Jun 14, 2019 10:24 pm

History is replete with incidences where poor translations (and the inability to read a foreign language) ultimately led to war. I shall only briefly mention five before explaining this week’s predicament.

1. French and German in the Ems Dispatch (Ems Telegram) incident – A poor French translation of Chancellor O. von Bismark’s manipulated report of a disastrous meeting between the French ambassador to Prussia and King Wilhelm I (King of Prussia, from the House of Hohenzollern) at ultimately resulted in France declaring – and losing - the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian War.

2. Amharic and Italian in the Treaty of Wuchale- The treaty was translated into Italian as “the Emperor must use the Italian foreign office in his relations with other powers” (which made Abyssinia a colony) and into Amharic as “the Emperor can use the Italian foreign office in his relations with other powers” (which allowed Abyssinia to be an independent empire). Suffice it to say, the Italians were not pleased to see that the treaty was unenforceable and declared – and lost – the 1895-1896 First Italo-Ethiopian War. (This just reminded me of the bad English-Maori translations in the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi).

3. English and French in the lead-up to the French and Indian War- British American Major George Washington had a skirmish with French Canadian troops and lost. The terms of his surrender were that he sign a document (in French) that British American troops had murdered a French Canadian ambassador. British-French tensions continued to rise until war broke out in 1754, in which the French ultimately lost.

4. English and Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin Incident: The USS Maddox destroyer was attacked by three N. Vietnamese patrol boats. The NSA intercepted N. Vietnamese communications and incorrectly interpreted ‘we sacrificed two comrades’ as ‘we sacrificed two ships’, which led to the US believing it had destroyed two of the three enemy boats. Ultimately, LB Johnson’s government became involved in the 2nd Indochina War in 1965, which the US lost.

5. English and Japanese in WW2: The US, China and the UK sent Japan’s PM an ultimatum demanding the surrender of the empire. The Pm replied in Japanese that he ‘refrained from making comments at the moment’ on the ultimatum, but was misunderstood as having said ‘the ultimatum was not worthy of comment.” Eleven days later, Hiroshima was obliterated by an atomic bomb.

On the 12th of June 2019, UBS’ senior economist, Paul Donovan wrote the following in an article discussing food inflation in China:

“Chinese consumer prices rose. This was mainly due to sick pigs. Does this matter? It matters if you are a Chinese pig. It matters if you like eating pork in China. It does not really matter to the rest of the world. China does not export a lot of food. The only global relevance would be if Chinese inflation influenced politics and other policies.”

The backlash to his article was astounding:

1. (Global Times’ Twitter) “UBS chief global economist Paul Donovan used distasteful and racist language to analyze China’s inflation in a recent UBS report, sparking uproar across Chinese social media. Chinese netizens called for an official apology from #UBS.”

2. (Global Times) “Chinese netizens were outraged on Thursday by a UBS report that used distasteful and racist language to analyze China's inflation and called for putting the Swiss bank on the Chinese Unreliable Entity List despite an apology for what it calls its “innocently intended comment"… some considered the UBS apology and the analyst involved not sincere, which they said reflects the deep arrogance of Western elites to Chinese culture.The report sparked outrage among Chinese netizens and some economists on China’s Weibo and Twitter."

3. (Weibo) “ “Not only did it not offer a sincere apology by saying that this was about consumer prices and higher pork prices, but also implied that Chinese people could not read English properly.”

4. ( Stephen Matthews, a linguistics professor at the University of Hong Kong) “The perceived insult is derived either from a misreading of the English text by a non-native speaker, or from a poor Chinese translation. Either way, the author is not at fault.

Whilst this UBSurdity can never be a casus belli to wage war on Switzerland, deadpan Donovan – who apologised profusely on Bloomberg on Thursday - has been placed on leave; and UBS – which will survive this imbroglio - has been boycotted by several Chinese companies. What does worry me is that we’re one misunderstanding away from a huge incident between China and a certain redacted country that holds frequent FONOPs in the South China Sea.

Since I have played the ultimate trump card by referring to the probability of a planet-killing nuclear conflagration, I would like to invite the forum’s members (and not apparatchiks!) to recall instances in which failures to translate/interpret what was being conveyed caused either or both party(ies) to be offended/laugh.
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golyplot
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Re: Lost In Translation

Postby golyplot » Fri Jun 14, 2019 11:31 pm

That reminds me a bit of the whole "Meet the Flockers" controversy. Though I think manufactured controversies like this are just an inevitable side effect of social media and the drive towards clickbait and outrage mongering.
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Doitsujin
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Re: Lost In Translation

Postby Doitsujin » Tue Jun 18, 2019 7:28 am

I've stumbled upon a somewhat related Guardian article: Language wars: the 19 greatest linguistic spats of all time.
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Querneus
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Re: Lost In Translation

Postby Querneus » Tue Jun 18, 2019 5:13 pm

golyplot wrote:That reminds me a bit of the whole "Meet the Flockers" controversy. Though I think manufactured controversies like this are just an inevitable side effect of social media and the drive towards clickbait and outrage mongering.

Not to mention the demise of journalism. Presumably journalists are being driven by dwindling revenue to write clickbait articles, all to get it spread through social media and drive traffic to websites of newspapers that just aren't selling anymore (or online news websites that try to replace them), which leads to people renouncing news services more, which leads to worse writing... A sad vicious cycle.
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