'It's rubbish': Translators are struggling to interpret Trump's unforgivably bad English
'It's rubbish': Translators are struggling to interpret Trump's unforgivably bad English
http://usuncut.com/news/rubbish-translators-struggling-interpret-trumps-unforgivably-bad-english/
It’s not just you.
As US media struggles to catch President Donald Trump in the same room with a fact, international listeners can’t tell the difference between the truth and a tall tale for a totally different reason — Trump’s use of English is almost too bizarre to translate.
Australia’s Special Broadcasting Service, SBS , reports how Trump’s signature speaking style is challenging the skill of interpreters world wide.
“ Trump est un casse-tête inédit et désolant” — ‘ Trump is an unprecedented and desolating struggle’,” wrote translator Bérengère Viennot in the December issue of Slate France
Trump is not just a unique speaker, according to Viennot, but a phenomenally poor one by grammatical standards.
“The poverty of the vocabulary is striking,” she wrote. The only thing Trump knows how to talk about is his November win; if you change the subject, communication really breaks down.
“When it comes to speaking of something other than his victory, he clings desperately to the words contained in the question put to him, without succeeding in completing his own thought.”
It gets better, or is it worse: Viennot says she’s faced with the additional danger of inadvertently normalizing Trump by standardizing his idiosyncratic oratory, falsely depicting “an ordinary politician who speaks properly.”
Soraya Caicedo, executive producer of SBS’s Spanish language radio broadcast, says it isn’t that the words Trump uses are hard to interpret, it’s that he uses many words arbitrarily for different things.
“When he says Mexicans are rapists, he’s talking about crime,” Caicedo said, “but when he says China is raping America, he’s talking about economics.”
“We cannot translate it literally as ‘China is sexually abusing America,” she added.
It remains unclear what exactly Trump means when he says “Make America Great Again,” but Caicedo says it transliterates to Spanish with a threatening ring, given the US’s history.
“When he says ‘Make America Great Again’, we are thinking of the kind of America that used to intervene in governments in Latin America,” she said.
For Viennot the issue is deeper than correct grammar — “I do not translate words, I translate thoughts” — the aim is to communicate not just what the original speaker said but also what they meant.
As an example, Viennot contrasts the job of translating Trump with translating his predecessor.
“In the case of Obama, it was rather simple: the thought is clear, thus delivered well, the vocabulary succinct, the syntax impeccable.”
However, Trump’s thought needs training wheels, she writes, because it is “much more hollow,” even if voluminous on any particular topic, putting the translator in a position to “revise, reduce and impoverish” their work.
“It is evident that his limited vocabulary reflects a narrow thought,” wrote Viennot, and such a simple grasp of language held by the leader of the most powerful Western nation is cause for alarm. Trump’s star power might even be a bad influence on other world leaders, dragging their language down to the gutter with his own. It might even be a necessity of dealing with him, notes Viennot, “for as he loves to say repeatedly, after all, he won.”
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More evidence of the way America is embarrassed by our President*.
OMG, so true.
“The poverty of the vocabulary is striking,” she wrote. The only thing Trump knows how to talk about is his November win; if you change the subject, communication really breaks down.
It is true that, except when bragging the election, it is almost impossible to understand him when he is not reading from a paper or teleprompter. He rambles on mindlessly, contradicts himself (many times in the same sentence), frequently does not finish sentences or changes subject right in the middle of one, plus he rarely, if ever, answers the question put to him by a reporter. He says he doesn't do drugs or drink. Maybe he should start.
English is a foreign language to our president.