The Trump Road Tour--Arabia, Israel, Europe

[GMDino]

(05-24-2017, 04:16 PM)bfine32 Wrote: In case anybody wants any non-insulting and/or belittling comments from the visit I listened to an interview with an interpreter today about Trump's visit and he said it is very difficult for them to translate for him because most dignitaries speak using similar phrases. He said Trump doesn't speak in the same common phrases and they have a hard time translating what he called his "Americanisims". He gave an example of how he had a hard (impossible) time translating "showboat".

He also said Trump uses a lot of "fillers" while he's thinking and those are difficult to translate, but he most or the audience will think he's keeping something from them.


Now back to the belittlement...

Yes, that's not belittling of him at all.


Well unless you want the POTUS to not use words like "showboat" and to be able to speak in full sentences.


But you did point to an interesting take on Trump (and did say where you heard the interview):


https://www.pri.org/stories/2017-05-21/ah-joys-and-challenges-translating-trump-russian

Quote:Berdy spends a lot of time dissecting the Russian language for insight into how to best translate it into English. She says in the mainstream American media, a lot gets lost in translation. Take the word Putin used to describe Donald Trump during the presidential campaign. It was reported that Putin was calling Trump "brilliant," as in super-smart. Berdy says it's more nuanced than that.



"The Russian word he used to describe him is 'yarkii' (яркий). That is a word that simply means very bright, a larger-than-life figure. It is basically positive but it isn't that he's brilliant or genius or anything like that at all."

Russian translators also find Trump's English tough to translate. "Sometimes people have trouble with him. They simply don't know what he's talking about," Berdy says. 


After Trump nominated Judge Neil M. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, the president quipped to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell: “If we end up with that gridlock, I would say, ‘If you can, Mitch, go nuclear.’” In Russian newspapers, the punchline was translated as "use the nuclear option."


Berdy giggles. "That sounded like the Republicans, if they couldn't get their way, they would have to drop a nuclear bomb on the Democrats."


In other cases, Russian translators clean up Trump's language. "This is partially because you sort of clean up the leaders because that's what you do," says Berdy. "They clean up all the run-on sentences or the sentences that begin and don't go anywhere at all. So he sounds actually kind of more like Putin than he sounds like Trump."

And what about all those tweets?



Berdy says Russian translators clean them up, too. "In English all of those Twitter short-forms like 'sad,' 'beautiful,' 'weak,' sound rather childish, at least to my ears. In Russian, it's more like, 'that's sad.' 'Isn't that unfortunate.' They sound more adult and kind of presidential. He sounds much better in Russian than he does in English." 

http://www.bbc.com/news/video_and_audio/headlines/38812093/us-president-donald-trump-lost-in-translation

Quote:US President Donald Trump: Lost in translation

Translating US President Donald Trump into many of the foreign languages that the BBC broadcasts in is a huge responsibility.
How do you interpret what he says and what he means? BBC Persian's Siavash Ardalan discusses the challenge of becoming Trump.

That one is a link to a video about the subject.  How DO they translate "what's in his heart" since he isn't meaning literally what he says?