Lost in Translation? The impact of translators on world history

Would Hiroshima have been bombed if the Japanese language contained a phrase meaning 'no comment'? 

Did a mistranslation of the Italian word 'canali' lead to a misunderstanding about life on Mars?

Anna Aslanyan delves into how translation has altered the course of world events in her new book Dancing on Ropes.

A translator and interpreter herself, Aslanyan is intrigued by the tightrope that translators walk in their work and how far a simple misunderstanding can go.

Translation and interpretation require quite different skills, she tells Nine to Noon.

“With translation, we usually mean written translation. So there has to be a text, a shopping list, or a car manual, or philosophical treatise, or a novel or an experimental poem - that's written translation.

“Interpreters are translators who have to think on their feet, so they translate oral utterings, they translate speech, you could be doing it at the conference when there is a speaker giving a talk.

"Or it could be in a courtroom … it could be a meeting between any two parties that don't share a language.”

There have been many famous cases of the far-reaching effects of mistranslation, Aslanyan says.

“In 1877 the Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli first turned his telescope towards Mars. And what he noticed, what looked to him like lines, dark lines, which connected some areas with others.

“So, he produced a new map of Mars. On that map, he called those markings or those lines 'canali', it's an Italian word and his English translators, the people who first translated Schiaparelli’s findings into English, translated canali as 'canals'. There was another possibility - 'channels' - but they somehow didn't use that word.

The English word 'canals' suggested artificial objects, Aslanyan says.

“And the existence of this artifice implied that there must be intelligent beings [on Mars].

“It all kicked off in the late 19th century, there was a real obsession with the idea that there was intelligent life on Mars.”

The course of Japanese history was altered by the nuances of language, she says. During World War II, the United States issued an ultimatum known as Potsdam Declaration, in which they demanded Japan surrender.

“The Japanese first thought they would play for time and they decided to publish it in the press without making any comments."

Unfortunately, there is no direct word or phrase in the Japanese language for ‘no comment’.

“So when the Prime Minister of Japan later read the statement, he didn't want to reject the terms, he didn't want to say that no, we're not going to surrender, they knew that was going to happen.

“But he used a Japanese word 'mokusatsu'. It literally translates as 'kill it with silence'. So, we want to kill this declaration with silence.”

The Americans took this silence as a slight, Aslanyan says.

“They translated it as 'ignore and treat with some contempt', and hence, the fate of Hiroshima was sealed.”

The Nuremberg trials after World War II put particular strain on interpreters of the time, both intellectually and emotionally, she says.

“One of the protagonists of [Dancing on Ropes], Richard Sonnenfeldt, he was a German Jew who fled the Nazis before the war broke out and ended up in America.

“Then he was conscripted during the war, he was fighting and at one point they had a German prisoner who had to be interrogated, and Sonnenfeldt was asked to help with that.

“He happened to be so good, so naturally good, that he was sent to Nuremberg.”

In his memoir, Sonnenfeldt wrote that he felt “the Jewish refugee I had once been tugging at my sleeve.”

“He is someone who has escaped the Holocaust and now he spends hours and hours with the Nazis, with the criminals, with the masterminds of the Final Solution.

“And he is torn between hating these people, but also wanting to do his job well. And this is the very delicate line he has to walk.”

The type of interpretation Sonnenfeldt did at Nuremberg was technically challenging, Aslanyan says.

“They were all translating and interpreting simultaneously, which meant that the speakers wouldn't stop for them, they listened and spoke at the same time.”

This may have been a blessing in disguise for the translators, though.

“The pressures meant that they couldn't even take in what was being said, they translated fairly accurately, presumably, or as well as they could.

“But the penny didn't drop until later, they only understood what horrors they had to translate afterwards.”

Some translations, such as German to English, present particular linguistic problems, Aslanyan says.

“German is notorious for their verb always coming at the end, which for an English sentence is obviously quite difficult.

“So you have to wait and wait and wait, you can’t get your subject or object structure in place, because you don't really know what someone did to someone until you listen to the very, very end.

“The German verb was one of the worst nightmares for the interpreters at Nuremberg.”

Historically, translators have sometimes toned down an original statement from another country in order not to offend their domestic audience.

When former US president Donald Trump referred to certain countries as “shit holes” in 2018, translators the world over tried to mitigate potential harm caused by his phrasing.

The most polite translation was used in Taiwan, where they translated 'shit holes' as ‘countries where birds do not lay eggs’.

Japan went with something like 'dirty toilets’ and Germany went for ‘garbage dumps',

"Everyone tried to make the horrible situation slightly better, just by toning [Trump's words] down a bit.”

In 2018, mistranslation caused the UK government to come a cropper with the publication of the Brexit White Paper.

“As if the decision to leave the European Union wasn't bad enough, they also embarrassed everyone by doing this - they published this white paper in 22 EU languages.

“And it was translated inhouse, clearly by people who didn't speak those languages particularly well.”

Some of the translation was “spectacularly bad”, Aslanyan says, with embarrassing errors throughout.

“The German text, judging by the reaction of native speakers, was the worst. The expression ‘letter of the law’ was translated as a ‘letter of the alphabet’.

“A Dutch speaker wrote on Twitter, ‘Dear UK Government, we appreciate the efforts but please stick to English. This is horrible, kind regards the Netherlands’.”

A couple of years ago, French prime minister Emmanuel Macron discovered the hard way that faux amis could lead to a faux pas.

“When he was visiting Australia in 2018 he thanked the Prime Minister at the time, Malcolm Turnbull, and his “delicious” wife."

Speaking in English, Macron reached for an English word that is similar to the French 'faux amis', meaning false friend.

“He probably just thought of the French word 'délicieux', which in French simply means charming, but he translated it in a way which sounded the closest and he came up with ‘delicious’ wife'."