I have occasionally commented on the perils of being multilingual, especially when one starts to lose fluency in one of those languages and must quickly translate thoughts in one language into words in another language.
I think of the time when I visited my native country several years ago and laughed aloud when I read in a local Spanish language newspaper that an American Airlines flight had been forced to make an emergency landing in Miami with 25 Ecuadoreans on board “con intoxicación.”
When my relatives asked what was so funny, I pointed to the headlines and explained that I visualized the pilot requesting an emergency landing because he had 25 drunken Ecuadoreans on board.
After they explained to me that the Ecuadoreans were not intoxicated, but rather suffered from food poisoning, I apologized profusely in Spanish telling them that I was “muy embarazado” about my poor Spanish. Sadly, that turned out to be an even more embarrassing mistake as I had just told them that I was “very pregnant.”
But no harm done. Just as I hope I did not harm too many Latin American chickens and turkeys when my first job after emigrating to this country was translating poultry medicine instructions labels from English to Spanish.
Later on in life, in the military and in industry abroad, I translated and interpreted minor romantic conversations for my buddies and more serious discussions and documents for my bosses – hopefully without major “mistranslations.”
But there are times when “Mistranslation Matters.”
That is the subject of an extremely interesting New York Times essay by Mark Polizzotti, author of “Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto.”
Polizzotti notes, “Translation is the silent waiter of linguistic performance: It often gets noticed only when it knocks over the serving cart. [As yours truly has often done] Sometimes these are relatively minor errors — a ham-handed rendering of an author’s prose, the sort of thing a book reviewer might skewer with an acid pen.”
But then there are “mistranslations” that may have changed history.
Take, Nikita Khrushchev’s infamous 1956 “We will bury you” which, according to Polizzotti, “ushered-in one of the Cold War’s most dangerous phases, one rife with paranoia and conviction that both sides were out to destroy the other.” In fact, when properly translated the statement means “We will outlast you.”
Or the Japanese Prime Minister’s response to the Allies’ July 1945 ultimatum — “just days before Hiroshima.” Kantaro Suzuki’s “No comment. We need more time” was fatefully (not faithfully!) conveyed to Harry Truman as “silent contempt” (“mokusatsu”). We all know the staggering consequences.
Polizzotti recalls the 9/11 events that “might well have been averted had the Arabic-language messages that American intelligence intercepted on Sept. 10 been processed sooner than the 12th — a matter less of misreading than of personnel shortages, but a failure of translation nonetheless.”
There are many more such momentous, historical “mistranslations,” according to Polizzotti, even in, or especially in the Bible, probably the most translated book of all times — some mistranslations having fatal consequences.
Often the fatal consequences of mistranslation befall the translators themselves:
A populist English translation of the New Testament by the 16th-century scholar William Tyndale got him executed by the clergy for heresy, and not long afterward the French printer and scholar Étienne Dolet was hanged and burned at the stake for a translation of Plato that was also deemed heretical.
More recently, the Japanese translator of Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” was murdered in 1991 for a mistranslation that was “not even his own,” but rather “a perceived blasphemy, unintended by the author.”
Closer to home, Polizzotti quotes a 2011 Armed Forces Journal report that claims interpreters in Iraq were “10 times more likely to die in combat than deployed American or international forces.”
Bringing us back to the times we live in, Polizzotti rightly warns about the perils of mistranslating Trump’s “free-form declarations to a global audience…[his] capricious employ of his native idiom, his fractured syntax and streaming non sequiturs…[which are] challenging enough for Anglophones, so imagine the difficulties they pose to foreigners…”
Referring to Trump’s and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un’s “mercurial speech patterns,” Polizzotti calls them “a potential minefield of catastrophic miscommunication. One can all too easily imagine another disaster on the order of Khrushchev’s ‘We will bury you’ or Suzuki’s ‘silent contempt,’ with far more cataclysmic results.”
For those brave enough to try their Spanish, this article can be read here in Spanish under the somewhat more ominous title “Las consecuencias mortales de malinterpretar.”
Lead image: Gerard Van der Leun, Brueghel- Tower-of-Babel, Flickr.com
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.