SEELANGS Digest - 2 Dec 2004 to 3 Dec 2004 (#2004-237)

[STEPHENBPEARL at CS.COM]

In a message dated 12/4/2004 3:50:17 AM Eastern Standard Time,
>  "

Perhaps this is the time to give our profession a boost by promoting
> the idea that every media outlet in the anglophone world should employ at =
>

       I am afraid that this would merely scratch the surface of a much
deeper and wider problem, namely the way in which news or reportage  from
non-English speaking sources that reaches your TV screen or breakfast table is
consistently warped. The possible range of distortion runs the gamut from garbled,
incoherent, nonsensical, self-contradictory, exotic, colourful and merely quaint
to, most dangerously, plain, starightforward mistranslation, but
mistranslation couched in
   correct, idiomatic English.

        A single "slavonic linguist" as a breakwater to stem the tide of
media mistranslation from all major foreign languages that daily sweeps over the
shores of the English-speaking world would be about as ineffectual as the
proverbial one-legged man at the Ass (Arse) - Kicking Convention.

       Today, The New York Times reported: " Look at my face, " Mr.
Yushchenko told the Ukrainian Parliament on Sept. 21, after his first stint in the
Vienna hospital. "Note my articulation. This is one -hundredth of the problems
that I've had. This is not a problem of political cuisine a ssuch. We are talking
about the Ukrainian political kitchen where assassinations are ordered."

       Could any SEELANGER supply the original Ukrainian version of this
passage [preferably in the form of a transliteration; it appears that messages
which start life in Cyrillic reach many of us in some form of "garbage".] and a
correct English version of it?

        My article, "Mistranslation and the Media" which addresses this
problem in some detail, appeared in The Hong Kong Linguist [No.15. 1995], published
by The Institute of Linguists, Hong Kong Regional Society.

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