Jimmy Carter REALLY likes Poland...

     After doing my post about the non existent translation error in Kennedy's famous 1963 speech, I got to wondering, have there ever been any real translation errors that have caused presidents of the past genuine embarrassment? After doing a bit of searching on Google, I hit the jackpot.

     Back in 1977, President Jimmy Carter was in Poland for a state visit. Seeking a translator for his time there, the State department hired Steven Seymour, who was a freelance linguist who was known for his expertise with translating written Polish. That expertise in dealing with Polish on paper, didn't translate into expertise in speaking Polish. During Carter's opening speech, Seymour translated the the English, "I have come to learn your opinions and understand your desires for the future." into the Polish, "I desire the Poles carnally."

     While that one mistake would have been bad enough, Seymour's didn't end there. Carter started talking about how happy he was to be in Poland, which was translated as he was happy to grasp Poland's private parts. Further on in Carter's speech, he talked about his departure from the U.S. which was translated, "when I left the United States never to return...". Lastly, Carter went on to praise the Polish constitution of 1791 as one of three great documents in the struggle for human rights. What Seymour told the Poles in attendance was that their constitution was to be ridiculed.

     Reasonably enough, the Polish people were left in that strange mix of anger and confusion that comes from when the leader of one of the most powerful countries in the world tells you that he wants to fondle you and your constitution is awful. However, the Poles weren't just angry because of just the translation. When Seymour did his awful translation job, he added a insult to injury by using Russian syntax and Polish idioms that had been out of style for 100 years. Also, keep in mind, this was the middle of the Cold War. Using any thing Russian is not the best move to make when you are translating to a people who were firmly behind the iron curtain and were being oppressed by the Russians. Not to mention that the Poles have a long history of not liking the Russians generally.

     Now Seymour was rightly fired after this debacle, but the Carter administration wasn't out of the woods yet. Looking for another translator, they hired Jerzy Krycki, a former employee of the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw. Krycki was assigned to translate for Carter at a state dinner. However, there was a slight problem. While Krycki was fluent in Polish, his English wasn't the greatest. So when Carter got up to give the toast, he was greeted with only silence from Krycki. Carter, thinking simply that Krycki had missed his que, spoke the second line of the toast and waited. Greeted by even more silence, Carter knew something was wrong. It turned out Krycki heard the president just fine, he just couldn't understand the president well enough to translate for him. Since he didn't want to repeat Seymour's mistake of mistranslation, Krycki just chose to remain silent. Fortunately, the Polish leader's translator stepped up and translated for the president.

     Fortunately for Carter, no other major mess ups happened during his trip abroad. As for both of the translators, they seemed to recover professionally after the incident, with Seymour continuing his work as a translator for poetry and Krycki working for a news agency. I guess the most important lesson to take away from this is you need to know what others are saying when they speak for you. Otherwise, you might end up propositioning and then insulting an entire nation.


Sources:
1. http://www.foxtranslate.com/translation/interpreter-mistake-offends-poland
2. http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pl&u=http://www.jerzy-krycki.mementi.pl/&prev=/search%3Fq%3DJerzy%2BKrycki%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1C1_____enUS417US417%26prmd%3Dimvnso&sa=X&ei=1_I-UL3oI-rO2gWVlIGwDg&ved=0CCcQ7gEwAA
3. http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1880208_1880218_1880227,00.html
4. http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/17003
5. http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=RO4yAAAAIBAJ&sjid=EO4FAAAAIBAJ&pg=5139,2759225&dq=carter+polish+translation&hl=en
6. http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1842&dat=19771230&id=hBIsAAAAIBAJ&sjid=BscEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3275,5984124
7. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/steven-seymour

  

     

"I am a Jelly Doughnut"

     The phrase above is an often quoted as being the translation of, "Ich bin ein Berliner", the famous phrase which Kennedy said during his speech on June 26, 1963 in Berlin. I had heard about this some time ago and recently did some digging into if this was true or not.

     

     The first place I stopped, and the first place many people stop when looking up info, was Wikipedia. On the page entry for the speech, there is a huge section dedicated to dealing with this misconception. According to the article, the reason seems to come from Kennedy's use of the word "ein", which he was correct in using since he was speaking in a figurative sense. The failure in translation seems to come from the fact that a "berliner" is a common name for a pastry outside of the city of Berlin. To quote the article:

     Whereas the citizens of Berlin do refer to themselves as Berliner, they generally do not refer to jelly doughnuts as Berliner. While these are known as Berliner Pfannkuchen (literally, "Berlin pancake"), commonly shortened to Berliner in other areas of Germany, they are simply called Pfannkuchen (pancakes) in and around Berlin.[12] According to the German History Museum, the theoretical ambiguity went unnoticed by Kennedy's audience.[13] As German professor Reinhold Aman writes, "Ich bin (ein) Berliner means 'I am a Berliner' or '...a male person/native of Berlin' and absolutely nothing else!...No intelligent native speaker of German tittered in Berlin when J.F.K. spoke, just as no native speaker of German, or one who does know this language would titter if someone said, Ich bin ein Wiener or Hamburger or Frankfurter."[14]

      Doing some further looking into on the "jelly doughnut" legend, I came across an article on About.com article, which quoted an older CNN article, that the man that who translated the phrase for JFK to use in his speech, was actually educated in Berlin and was fluent in German. Also, according to an article on Snopes.com, the speech was practiced in front of several German officials, including the mayor of Berlin himself! Also, that article points out that any laughter heard from around that point in the speech was from JFK making a quip thanking his translator for translating his German.

     While it would have been embarrassingly funny for one of our most memorable presidents to have called himself a "jelly doughnut" for all of history to remember, the truth is much more mundane than urban legend would have us believe. Which, the more I look into history seems often to be the case.

Sources:
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ich_bin_ein_Berliner
2. http://urbanlegends.about.com/cs/historical/a/jfk_berliner_2.htm
3. http://www.snopes.com/language/misxlate/berliner.asp

I'm not a Jenny

We got this voice mail from my mother-in-law the other day about my sister-in-law having a table she was selling and was offering us first dibs on. What follows is priceless:

What Google Voice heard:
Hi. This is, Belinda just calling to let you know I'm not a Jenny has that Tom Foley in title is want is kind of a title. I talked to get in shape. Notexactly that you could put stuff in the bottom of it is nice. She was trying to sell for $10 a day, but it won't it and that he's ever waged if y'allwould like to have it. Just let me know that I could maybe bring it out there this coming weekend or What ever is you know there's lights. I canoffer you could put it in a week or the ways state this listing those. Thank you. Bye.

What was actually said:

All I want to know is what exercise plan there is where you can just talk to get in shape? Maybe you spend all your time talking so you can't eat?

The Simplified Spelling Board

     I recently saw this link on io9.com on why we don't spell many English phonetically (how they sound). It is from there that I first heard about the Simplified Spelling Board. This Simplified Spelling Board was formed in 1906 with the express goal of simplifying the spelling of English language. One of the main proponents of this was the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie wanted to simplify the spelling of the English language so that it could be used as a tool for world peace by having a simple, easy to learn language that everyone could use. However, as any child learning English in school, or any non native English speaker learns very quickly, the way we spell things, the rules we have for how to change tenses and make plurals, as well as the words that are spelled the same but have vastly different meanings, English can be anything but easy to learn.

     Carnegie's board was set up to handle the first problem, spelling words completely unlike they are pronounced. This one has bugged me since school, and there are still times when I come upon an unfamiliar word, think it's pronounced one way, only to find it's pronounced differently. This is especially a problem for me, because usually when I learn something a certain way, it is nigh impossible for me to get it out of my head, even if it is wrong. Some examples of the first words that they wanted to change "Sabre" to "Saber" "Wished" to "Wisht" and "Catalogue" to "Catalog". Some of these make sense. The sabre one has always thrown me for a loop. When ever I see it I have to catch my self from thinking it says "sobre" or "saabre" and remind my self that it's "saber".

     There are other examples of changes suggested by the board that would drive an English teacher wild with anger. One of the big ones is that Carnegie himself came out in support of removing the "gh" from the words where that stands in for the "f" sound, like "enough" would be "enuf". The last one would be phonetically correct, but after having years of English teachers pound on you that the first one is correct, the mere sight of the second one is grating to the nerves. At least mine anyway.

     As a child in school, one of the biggest things that got on my nerves was trying to take nouns like the word "moose" and make it plural. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense that you take a word like "goose" and to  make it plural you change it to "geese", but to make "moose" plural you use the same word. Another example is the word "mongoose". You would think that the correct pluralization would be "mongeese", but you would be wrong, the correct plural form of the word is "mongooses".

     Lastly one of the biggest things that drives me nuts about the English language is how we have we can have two words that are spelled the same, but can be pronounced completely differently and mean two entirely different things. One of the best examples of this is "live" and "live". The first one should be pronounced "liv" and the second "live", just in case you couldn't tell. They have completely different meanings, completely different pronunciations, but are spelled completely the same. My wife and I have a 1 year old daughter and it is stuff like this that makes me dread her going to school. It makes me realize that we will receive the dreaded question, "Why?". Which especially bothers me when the only answer I can give is, "Well, it just is."

     The age of the simplified spelling board has come and gone, but there seems to have arisen a new, however very informal, force that is pushing to bring change to the English language: the Internet. It has been interesting to see how many new words are being brought forth every year and added to the great official book of the English language, Webster's dictionary. I remember how it was such a big deal when the word "e-mail" was added, and I love hearing every year when they release the new words that are being added in. Hopefully, along with the adding new words in, we can look back at some of our old ones and try to make them a little less confusing, if not for ourselves, for all of the new English learners out there.


Sources
http://io9.com/5936477/why-cant-we-spell-english-words-phonetically
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board
http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j26/carnegie.php
http://www.rinkworks.com/words/wordforms.shtml
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/08/why-did-english-stop-changing-lets-blame-the-book-of-common-prayer/261589/

Star Wars Episode 3: Back Stroke of the West

Sometimes you see something so funny you can't help but share it. The title of this post refers to a blogpost at winterson.com about a re-translation of the Chinese subtitles for Episode 3 back into English. The results of which are hilarious. I first saw this years ago, but this, along with several other engrish websites over the years, are some of the things that inspired me to make this blog. Below are some of my favorite photos from that post, but many more can be found on the linked post above.










Many, just as funny as these, can be found here



All pictures are property of winterson.com

Beware Apollo water.....

This is a voice mail my wife left me the other day, thought that Google voice made some interesting choices...

Google voice:
Hey, it's Christy m I was just calling to let you know. It's about 5 and We're about to start trying to get all the stuff out of the calling tail, to, you may baby home, I don't know that I love you and I'll see if you could beat me home if you could get Apollo water killing for the mac and cheese. I'd really appreciate it. I'd love you, bye.

Actual Message:


Who knew that mac and cheese was worth killing for ;)

Carpe Diem?

     Most of us have heard the Latin phrase Carpe Diem, or it's English translation "seize the day". I got to wondering, what would you get if you translated that phrase into another language using Google translate and then tried to translate it back to English?
     I decided to see what would happen if you translated the phrase into Chinese and then back into English. Would it come out the same? Or would you get something completely different? My first step was to translate "seize the day" into Chinese, which resulted in this:

seize the day = 只争朝夕

Next, I took the Chinese translation and re-translated it into English and got:

只争朝夕 =   Race against time or Seize every minute

     The interesting thing to me is how on the re-translation back into English, the message of the phrase seems to imply the need for speed, in either you are racing against the clock, or instead of the lot longer day, you are trying to seize every minute. You still have that sense of purpose the English translation has, just with an added sense of urgency. It's interesting how things change when you go between languages. 

Carpe Diem
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpe_diem

Language

Language is one of, if not the greatest invention that man created. Having the ability to transfer information, feelings, and concepts from yourself to someone else can be one of the most empowering things that a person can do. However, more often than not, we end up saying one thing, and what people hear is something completely different, especially when tech or translating something from one language to another gets involved.


That's where this site comes in. Anybody who has used Google translate or Google Voice has seen the bizarre, often hilarious, results that it has produced. Not to knock these products, both are amazing examples of tech, but they still are not perfect. My goal with this site is to catalog some of the more strange and funny examples these produce, along with some of the funniest examples of translation fails, cultural understanding fails and general language fails.


I hope you enjoy the site!