Including a nuclear error and "grabbing Poland's sensitive organs": Learn about the most prominent translation errors on its International Day

On September 30 of each year, the world celebrates the International Day of Translation. The United Nations website says that this day is intended to be an opportunity to pay tribute to the work of language specialists, who play an important role in bringing countries together, facilitating dialogue, understanding and cooperation, contributing to development and promoting global peace and security.

The International Foundation's website adds that the transfer of literary or scientific work, including artwork, from one language to another, and professional translation, including appropriate translation, interpretation and terminology, is indispensable for maintaining clarity, positive climate and productivity in international public discourse and communication. between people.

Thus, on May 24, 2017, the General Assembly adopted a resolution on the role of language professionals in connecting nations and promoting peace, understanding and development, and declared September 30 as the International Day of Translation.

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September 30 was chosen as the feast of Saint Jerome, the translator of the Bible, who is considered the patron saint of translators.

Saint Jerome was a priest from northeastern Italy, known mostly for trying to translate most of the Bible into Latin from the Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. He also translated parts of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. He had learned Latin at school and mastered Greek and Hebrew, which he learned from his studies and travels. Jerome died near Bethlehem on September 30, 420.

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Every year since 2005, the United Nations invites all its staff, accredited Permanent Mission staff and students from selected partner universities to compete in the Saint Jerome Translation Competition at the United Nations, a competition that rewards the best translations in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish as well as German, and aims to celebrate the diversity of languages ​​and highlight the important role of translators and other language specialists in multilateral diplomacy.

The American newspaper, The Washington Post, said that the world has 7,102 languages, Asia tops the list with 2,301 languages, and Africa is followed by 2,138 languages.

There are about 1,300 languages ​​in the Pacific, and 1,064 in South and North America.

Europe ranks last with only 286 languages ​​despite its nation-states.

From this standpoint, translation plays an important and vital role in our lives and our communication with each other, but what about translation errors and their repercussions?

Here are the most prominent of those errors:

"Mokusatsu"

Encyclopedia Britannica says the Potsdam Declaration, the ultimatum issued by the United States, Great Britain and China on July 26, 1945, calling for the unconditional surrender of Japan came at the Potsdam Conference near the end of World War II held two months after the surrender of Germany. Allied leaders met in Potsdam, Germany, to discuss peace settlements, among other issues.

However, although the conflict ended on the European stage, the war continued on the Pacific theater where Japan continued to fight.

US President Truman, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek drafted a declaration setting out the terms of Japan's surrender and giving stern warnings if it refused to lay down arms. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin was not part of the ultimatum because his country had not yet declared war on Japan.

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The announcement claimed that "unintelligent arithmetic" by Japan's military advisors had brought the country to "the threshold of annihilation", hoping that the Japanese would "follow the path of reason".

The leaders set out the terms of the surrender, which included complete disarmament, the occupation of certain areas, and the establishment of a "responsible government". However, the statement also pledged that Japan "will not be enslaved as a race or destroyed as a nation."

The declaration ended with a warning of "immediate and utter destruction" if Japan refused to surrender unconditionally.

Encyclopedia Britannica says that Japanese Prime Minister Suzuki Kantarward, in a press conference, issued the last warning with the word "Mokusatsu", a word that sparked a lot of controversy.

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The media translated this word to mean that he refused or ignored the warning, and others later pointed out that the translation was wrong and that mokusatsu could be translated as "No comment."

Japan made no further statements in the following days. On August 6, 1945, the US military dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, destroying most of the city, and Nagasaki was bombed 3 days later. During this time, the Soviet Union also declared war on Japan.

On August 15 of that year, Japan formally surrendered.

Vietnam War

One of the unfortunate moments in US history was its unwanted participation in the Vietnam War.

Countless mistranslations were reported, as documents were reported to be falsified and destroyed after being translated into English.

In 1964, a detailed report stated that North Vietnamese forces attacked American ships in Tolkien Bay twice.

The attack sparked retaliation from the US government, but the crazy thing is that the second strike never happened, and it was caused by a translation error.

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As the war dragged on, the agency turned to counterfeiting and destroying materials.

The war thereafter continued on the misrepresentation of the scale of violence involved in this case, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides in Vietnam.

Valentine's Day in Japanese

From Japan, too, there was an error in translation, but it benefited the chocolate companies and later jewelry and precious gifts.

In 1968, a Japanese chocolate company wanted to promote Valentine's Day in Japan, which had proven to be a successful marketing tool in America. But due to an error in translation, the advertising for Valentine's Day in Japan was that women would give chocolates to men and not the other way around.

So, marketing campaigns were launched that promoted the idea of ​​"Giri Chico" or the mandatory chocolate that women give to the important others in their lives.

If the mistranslation brought about a happy ending for the company, it was not the case with its male clients.

Later in the 1970's companies began marketing March 14th to keep up with sales, calling it "White Day" as a way for those who received chocolates on Valentine's Day to return the gift in the form of candy and cookies.

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But over the years, simple "white day" candy has turned into expensive jewellery.

Thus it became the Japanese tradition for women to give men chocolates on February 14 (Valentine's Day), and a month later the men did the opposite, and marketing and mistranslation were blamed for the birth of two unintended cultural trends that still exist today.

"War of the Worlds"

When Italian astronomer Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli set out to map Mars in 1877, he inadvertently sparked an entire state of science fiction.

The scientist who was director of the Brera Observation Center in Milan called the dark and illuminated regions on Mars "seas" and "continents", describing what he thought were channels with the Italian word "canali".

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Unfortunately, his peers translated that word to mean "water channels like those cut by humans on the surface of the Earth", giving rise to the theory that behind these channels is a kind of intelligence emanating from a form of life on Mars.

The American astronomer Percival Lowell, convinced that these canals were real, drew hundreds of them between 1894 and 1895. Over the course of twenty years, he published three books on Mars that included illustrations showing what he believed to be facilities built by illustrious engineers to transport water. One writer influenced by Lowell's theories published a book on intelligent Martians.

In The War of the Worlds, which first appeared in serial form in 1897, H.G. Wells described the invasion of Earth by Martians, spawning genres and degrees of science fiction.

As for the novel The Princess of Mars, written by Edgar Rice Baroves in 1911, it also talked about the decline of the Martian civilization, using the names that Schiaparelli gave to the various phenomena of that planet.

Space scientists agree that there are no canals that carry water on Mars, and that it is only the creation of language and wild imagination.

According to NASA: “The network of intersecting lines that covers the surface of Mars is the result of a pure human desire to see specific shapes, even if these shapes do not actually exist. When we look at a faint group of dark spots, the eye works to connect them with lines straight".

A mistake worth $71 million

Mistranslation can cause serious impact as in the case of medical accidents.

Willie Ramirez was in a coma when he was admitted to a Florida hospital in 1980, his parents trying to describe their child's condition to his attending physician, who unfortunately could not understand a single word of Spanish.

A bilingual hospital employee began translating the parents' words for the doctors.

The tragic accident came from just one word, "liqueur", which the staff translated as "drunk". However, Ramirez's actual condition was "poisoning," which made a big difference in terms of the drugs he was given.

And the family was trying to tell that Willy had been poisoned, not in a drug overdose.

The poor handling of the situation left Ramirez with a quadriplegic when he woke up from a coma.

The hospital was required to settle this error by paying more than $71 million for permanent damages to Willie.

The "lusts" of the Poles

Former US President Jimmy Carter knew how to grab public attention. In a speech he gave during his visit to Poland in 1977, the translation showed him as showing a sexual desire for the people of Poland, then under communist rule. Carter wanted to say that he wished to know more about "the future desires of the Poles", which translates as "the future desires of the Poles".

That translator who made a place in history also transformed Carter's phrase "I left the United States this morning" into "I left the United States and will never return," Time magazine said.

Even the innocent phrase in which Carter said he was happy to be in Poland, translated after translation, means that he was happy to "grab Poland's sensitive organs".

Not surprisingly, the president used a different interpreter when he was at a state dinner later in the same visit. But his suffering didn't end there either. After he delivered the first line of his speech, Carter paused to face complete silence, and after he delivered another line, there was a complete silence again.

The new translator, who did not understand the President's English, decided the best thing to do was to shut up. With Carter's journey coming to an end, he became a source of jokes for the Poles.

Radiation overdose

In 2004, several employees of a French hospital were convicted of manslaughter after they improperly treated more than 450 cancer patients over a period of more than four years and 7 patients died.

The reason for the improper treatment was the improper management of the new radiology equipment.

Instruction manuals for the new machines were in English, hospital staff were French, and due to mistranslation, radiation doses were incorrectly estimated.

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The hospital radiologist was not only sentenced to manslaughter, but to evidence destruction and continued to deny the charges.

Reports showed patients received 20 percent more radiation than recommended due to a calibration error.

Although the doctors acknowledged the "human error" that had occurred which led to various medical complications for their patients, the court proceeded to bring charges given the gravity of the situation. The case was reputed to be one of the most serious medical mistranslations to occur in France.

"We will bury you."

In 1956, statements by then-Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev were translated: “We will bury you,” addressing Western ambassadors during a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow.

The sentence made headlines in newspapers and magazines, further cooling relations between the Soviet Union and the West. But when put into context, Khrushchev's words meant "whether you like it or not, history will be on our side, and we will bury you."

Khrushchev was saying that communism would continue beyond capitalism that would destroy itself from within, referring to a paragraph of Karl Marx's Communist Declaration that stated that "what the bourgeois class produces in the end they will dig its grave for."

While he could have used a different, calming phrase, it was not that phrase that sparked anti-communism among Americans, and increased their fear of being attacked by nuclear weapons.

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Khrushchev made sure to clarify what he meant but many years later. "One day I said, 'We will bury you,'" he said in a speech in 1963 in Yugoslavia, and that caused me many problems. Of course we will not bury you with a shovel, but it will be your working class itself.

asks and asks

Translations during negotiations are often controversial. The mistranslation of the French word for "to ask" led to tension in the negotiations between Paris and Washington in 1830.

A secretary translated a letter to the White House that began with "The French government asks" as "The French government asks." The US President could only treat the letter as containing a list of demands. But the two sides resumed negotiations after correcting that mistake.

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Some countries are accused of exploiting the difference in language to their advantage. The Treaty of Waitangi, a written agreement between the British Crown and the Maori people of New Zealand was signed in 1840 by 400 chiefs. But conflicting phrases in the English and Maori texts have led to disputes, which are expressed in the slogan "The Agreement is fraudulent" raised by Maori in New Zealand during their protests.

Trump impeachment

During the visit of former United States President Donald Trump to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a news network published a story entitled "The White House is considering procedures to remove the president from office," and the news was quoted from the English version.

The news spread quickly and was reported by many media outlets, and the news was widely spread on social media.

But the translation was not accurate, as the original news published on the English version said that the White House lawyers are studying the legal confrontation in the event of Congress requesting the impeachment of Trump.

misunderstanding

Sometimes the problem is misunderstanding, not mistranslation. This repeated saying finds its ground in the context of ready-made racist stereotypes. During Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972, then-Chinese Prime Minister Zhou Enali said it was "too early to say..." in his assessment of the effects of the French Revolution.

He was praised for these words, which the Chinese viewed as reflecting Chinese philosophy, although in fact he was referring to the events of 1968 in France.

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According to retired US diplomat Charles Freeman, President Nixon's personal interpreter, during that historic visit, the misunderstood remark was "one of the times when it's misunderstood in a manner appropriate to the saying, and is not forever corrected."

"I can only explain the confusion caused by the Chinese official's statement in terms of the context that highlights the preconceived notion of Chinese statesmen as far-sighted leaders, unlike their European counterparts," Freeman adds. And he continues, "That (meaning) was exactly what people wanted to hear and believe, and that's why it took hold."