Lost In Translation

[loic]

(reposted from a comment I made)
I speak enough French to be able to follow along in movies most of the time. I find it frustrating when the English subtitles fail to convey subtlety in the language or even skip whole parts of sentences for space or time reasons. I'm sure the same thing occurs when translating political leaders' speeches, and when

Comments

[ataxi]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel

Ahmadinejad's alleged comments about "wiping Israel off the map" were also a mistranslation. The alternate "vanishing from the pages of time" is also very worrisome in any political context (imagine if Yudoyono was heard to say "I hope Australia will vanish from the pages of time"!) but doesn't have the belligerence of the other.

[_fustian]

Snap.

But the real translation doesn't equate to "I hope Australia will vanish from the pages of time", rather "One day, the Howard government will be gone and forgotten".

[ataxi]

Snap indeed.

If you asked Ahmadinejad in a press conference if he hoped Israel would disappear, he'd probably give you a happy "yes". But the translation run by the NYT had a sensationalist tone of military aggression feeding nicely into US fears of a nuclear Iran.

One day the US voter might stop and wonder why the world is set up so they have to fear a nuclear Iran, and how it came to be that way ...

[_fustian]

Ahmadinejad's "holocaust denial" is generally considered by Farsi speakers and scholars as a questioning of the mythologizing of the holocaust into a universal excuse for Israeli aggression

Yep, and his "Israel must be wiped off the map" threat was actually noting that the Ayatollah thought the then-current regime would inevitably collapse.

Point well made; political speech is all about subtlety and context, and that's always going to require very careful translation.

How it was taken

[anonymous]

Well I can say that in Israel it was taken as a threat.
We look north and see Hizbullah funded by them and south at Hamas too.
Why do you think Iran is looking for nuclear technology?

Re: How it was taken

[loic]

I think it was clearly threatening, but the subtlety of his words are probably lost through translation.

As to why Iran wants nuclear weapons? Basically all of its neighbors and rivals in the region (Israel, Russia, India, Pakistan) are nuclear. What we learned from the European cold war was that everyone having nukes = peace. I don't like it, but I think it's an entirely rational response. After all Israel has attacked Syrian and Iraqi military installations, having a credible threat of retaliation would prevent similar actions against Iran.