Response to Commentary: Bush's translator in Romania

[McGinnis, Scott]

From: Dumitrescu, Domnita [mailto:ddumitr at exchange.calstatela.edu] 
Sent: Wednesday, December 04, 2002 3:20 PM
 
I am sorry, but if "standind hip to hip" instead of "shoulder to
shoulder" with somebody is not a substantive error, then what is it? A
whole country is laughing and making jokes about this. Why are we always
so tolerant of language mistakes, even at high levels of governance?
It's like the media that, on the occasion of the visit, wrote that
Romania is a Baltic country, and that its president is Constantinescu
(actually, this is its ex-president), not Iliescu. I am a professor, and
I wouldn't accept such mistakes from my students, who anyways make them
for free. But these people are paid salaries to do their job, and to do
it well, so why should we be so tolerant, after all? Just because it's
language,and not corporate business? In other fields, mistakes are much
less tolerated, I suppose, becauase they cost money. Here, they cost
image, reputation, prestige, call it  as you like, but they are not
completely costless.
Domnita Dumitrescu 
-----Original Message----- 
 Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 11:28:30 -0500  
From: "Bernhardt, James E" <BernhardtJE at state.gov> 
 
Ray's e-mail is a little surprising since it seems to assume that the 
American translator or interpreter must have been a native speaker of 
English.  Of all places, I would think at the Heritage language list 
would 
be a place where speakers of all languages could be considered American 
and 
Americans would not be assumed to be English speakers.  My guess is that

the 
translator was a native speaker of Rumanian and that while 'mistakes 
were 
made,' the ones mentioned so far were not substantive.  An elegant 
translation would have been better, of course. 
James E. Bernhardt 
 
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