How Do You Say ‘Hillary’s Gaffe’ in Russian?
Charles Ganske
By Oleg Atbashian
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with the famous "reset" button. In light of the Cold War
MAD connotations of "
The Button", should it have been red? Or even a button at all?
Did you know that if you translate “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” into Russian, it becomes “the vodka is agreeable but the meat has gone bad”? Literal translations can be tricky that way.
It seems that no translators were harmed in the manufacturing of Hillary Clinton’s “reset” button, which she presented to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Geneva on Friday.
“We worked hard to get the right Russian word,” Clinton addressed Lavrov in a deliberately slow voice, as if talking to a special-needs child. “Do you think we got it?”
“You got it wrong,” Lavrov answered in fluent English. “This says ‘peregruzka,’ which means overcharged.”
Well, it looks like somebody used a cheap electronic translation program. But it could be worse. I once came across a website that advertised its automated translation service with an example of a label from a jar of pickles, informing Russian consumers that it contained condoms.
Talk about food safety! That’s what you get when you translate “preservatives” without as much as a human touch.
Secretary of State Clinton's term "peregruzka" which she thought meant "reset" means overloaded with too many (electrical) amps, not overcharged as in too many dollars. As Mr. Atbashian says, after eight years of alleged rank incompetence in our foreign policy, it's great to see a new era of super competency and sophistication ushered in by the Obama Administration.
Incidentally, Hillary Clinton’s linguistic episode in Geneva also clarified the translation of the Obama administration’s term “worked hard,” which in plain English means “did half-assed job.”News reports would make us believe that Hillary’s philological mishaps ended right there. Not so. After the two top diplomats stopped laughing, Clinton quipped: “We won’t let you do that to us, I promise.”
That may have sounded sharp in English, but in Russian it came out even goofier than the wrong label on the red button.
Mrs. Clinton’s clever comeback implied that she understood “overcharge” in terms of charging too much money. We may even credit her with referring to the difference between an observed market price and a price that would have been observed in the absence of collusion, which was what many suspected the oil-producing nations were doing last year. In that sense, and only in that sense, was Hillary’s comment meaningful and amusing.
The problem is that the word “peregruzka” has nothing to do with economics. As students of foreign languages well know, most words have multiple meanings, and their combinations almost never coincide in different languages. Thus, the English word “overcharge” may mean many things to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but they are all translated into Russian by completely different words that are not interchangeable. In economic terms, “overcharge” becomes “obschitat’” or “zavysit’ tsenu” — but never “peregruzka.”
Perhaps, the embarrassment could be avoided if Lavrov had translated it literally, as “overload.” But in the context of a red button, he chose a more specific electrical term “overcharge,” meaning “too much amperage in the circuit.”
As a result, to the Russian-speaking audience, Hillary’s retort “We won’t let you do that to us” could only mean one thing: “Americans won’t let Sergey Lavrov give them too much amperage.”
The confusion could also be avoided if, instead of Hillary Clinton, the job of Secretary of State was performed by a professional — like Condoleezza Rice, who speaks fluent Russian, and who wouldn’t have opted for the lame plastic button because this joke doesn’t work in Russian to begin with. (WOW, who knew? A concert pianist and multi-linguisitic... )
Russian is a rich and flexible language with versatile descriptive means, but it just doesn’t have a short universal word that embraces all the meanings of the allusive English “reset.” The word “perezagruzka” (”reload”), which later was claimed to be the right term, comes off just as awkward and uninspiring as any other possible translation. Anyone with a sense of the Russian language could’ve told Clinton that the gag was a dud.
Other reports indicate that “Hillary Clinton raised eyebrows on her first visit to Europe as secretary of state when she mispronounced her EU counterparts’ names and claimed U.S. democracy was older than Europe’s.” In one particular case, she kept referring to European Commission External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner as “Benito,” invoking the memories of Mussolini.
This looks rather ironic, considering that the current leaders in Washington had come to power by accusing their conservative predecessors of being pig-headed and deaf to other cultures and nuances. Turns out, they were merely projecting their own image on their opponents, given that they themselves can’t even distribute party favors to foreigners without a screw-up.
COUNT ME OUT OF HER REPRESENTING ME AS ONE OF THE 18 MILLION CRACKS! SHE DOESN'T EVEN DO HER HOMEWORK PROPERLY... HOW EMBARRASSING.
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