One year ago, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton experienced enormous public embarrassment when presenting a mistranslated gift to Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov. Clinton attempted to symbolize a “resetting” of the relationship between the two countries when presenting Lavrov with a gift-wrapped red button, labeled “Reset” in English and “Peregruzka” in Russian. Unfortunately, “peregruzka” means “overcharged,” or “overloaded.” The Russian word for “reset” is actually “pereZAgruzka” or more correctly “перезагрузка” in Cyrillic.
As shown below, Lavrov immediately called out the error while the cameras were rolling.
This may seem like a simple slip-up by a single person, but there was really a comedy of errors that contributed to this blunder:
- The original error was committed by a non-professional translator who was non-native speaker of Russian. That person decided to either use a dictionary, machine translation, or some other unreliable source.
- The translation was “checked” at the last minute by someone who knew Russian but was not a native speaker.
- The button was made using roman letters instead of Russian’s standard Cyrillic.
- While presenting the gift, Clinton told Lavrov, “we worked really hard to get it right,” when that was far from the truth. The US State Department actually has a phenomenal in-house translation department and great native-speaking translators. It would not have taken much to simply request the translation from one of the State Department’s own professional Russian translators.
Contact GGI for expert help by native-speaking translators that will avoid such public international blunders.
