Lost In Translation: What Interpreters Are Really Telling Their Audiences
Posted August 30, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
If you’ve ever tried to read the English language instructions that come with a Japanese-made electronic device, you know a lot about things being lost in translation. After all, the manuals don’t exactly come with personal interpreters telling you what they’re really supposed to say. But did you ever wonder just how well those translators actually get the message across? Richard Woolcott did. He’s an Australian diplomat who ran his country’s foreign service for years. And in a soon-to-be-published tome called “Undiplomatic Activities,” he reveals that what you say in one language isn’t always what the audience hears in another.
The problem is in the colloquial or slang expressions unique to various countries. Which is what got Woolcott into trouble during a talk in Indonesia. “Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of my wife and myself, I want to say how delighted we are to be in Palembang,” he told the crowd in English. But that’s not what they heard. “Ladies and gentlemen, on top of my wife, I am delighted to be in Palembang,” was the translation.
When former Aussie Prime Minister Bob Hawke dismissed a question from Japanese lawmakers with the slang expression, “I am not here to play funny buggers”, his interpreters had no idea how to translate it. So they came up with this: “I am not here to play laughing homosexuals with you.”
Another speech on the close relationship between two countries came out this way in the Far East. “Australia and China are enjoying simultaneous orgasms in their relationship.”
But the best story may be the one that doesn’t get told. When an Asian minister told a joke in Seoul, the interpreter spent a moment translating it into Korean, and the audience howled, then applauded. But it wasn’t until later on that the truth came out. “Frankly, minister, I did not understand your joke,” the man admitted sheepishly. “So I said in Korean that the minister has told his obligatory joke, would you all please laugh heartily and applaud.”
You can only wonder what they’d do with the Canadian classic, “Take off, eh, you hoser?”
