In an article in Gentleman's Quarterly 1987, Kenneth Turan described some of
the misunderstandings that have occurred during the dubbing or subtitling of
American movies in Europe. In one movie where a policeman tells a motorist to
pull over, the Italian translator has him asking for a sweater (i.e., a pullover). In
another where a character asks if he can bring a date to the funeral, the Spanish
subtitle has him asking if he can bring a fig to the funeral.
In the early 1970s, according to Time magazine, Russian diplomats were issued a Russian/English phrasebook that fell into Western hands and was found to
contain such model sentences as this instruction to a waiter: "Please give me
curds, sower cream, fried chicks, pulled bread and one jellyfish." When
shopping, the well-versed Soviet emissary was told to order "a ladies' worsted-
nylon swimming pants."
But of course it works the other way. A Braniff Airlines ad that intended to tell
Spanish-speaking fliers that they could enjoy sitting in leather (en cuero) seats,
told them that they could fly encuero—without clothes on.
In 1977, President Carter, on a trip to Poland, wanted to tell the people, "I wish
to learn your opinions and understand your desires for the future," but his
interpreter made it come out as "I desire the Poles carnally." The interpreter also
had the president telling the Poles that he had "abandoned" the United States that
day, instead of leaving it. After a couple of hours of such gaffes, the president
wisely abandoned the interpreter.
All of this seems comical, but in fact it masks a serious deficiency. Because the
richest and most powerful nation on earth could not come up with an interpreter
who could speak modern Polish, President Carter had to rely on Polish
government interpreters, who naturally "interpreted" his speeches and
pronouncements in a way that fit Polish political sensibilities. When, for
instance, President Carter offered his condolences to dissident journalists who
"wanted to attend but were not permitted to come," the interpreters translated it
as "who wanted to come but couldn't" and thus the audience missed the point. In
the same way, President Nixon in China had to rely on interpreters supplied by
the Chinese government.
We in the English-speaking world have often been highly complacent in
expecting others to learn English without our making anything like the same
effort in return. As of 1986, the number of American students studying Russian
was 25,000. The number of Russian students studying English was four million
—giving a ratio of 160 to one in the Soviet's favor. In 1986, the Munich
newspaper Siiddeutsche Zeitung investigated the studying of German as a
foreign language around the world. In the United States, the number of college
students taking a German course was 120,000, down from 216,000 in 1966. In
the Soviet Union, the number was nine million. The problem is unlikely to get
better. Between 1966 and 1986, 150 American colleges and universities canceled their German programs. In 1989, some 77 percent of all new college graduates had taken no foreign language courses. A presidential commission under Ronald Reagan called the situation scandalous.
In 1987, in an effort to redress the balance Congress voted into law the
Education for Economic Security Act, which provided an extra $2.45 million to
promote the study of foreign languages—or a little over one cent per person in
the country. That should really turn the tables. There is evidence to suggest that
some members of Congress aren't fully sympathetic with the necessity for a
commercial nation to be multilingual. As one congressman quite seriously told
Dr. David Edwards, head of the Joint National Committee on Languages, "If
English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it's good enough for me,"
Not only are we not doing terribly well at foreign languages, we're not even
doing terribly well at English. The problem was well voiced by Professor
Randolph Quirk, president of the British Academy and one of that country's
leading linguistic scholars, when he wrote: "It would be ironic indeed if the
millions of children in Germany, Japan and China who are diligently learning the
language of Shakespeare and Eliot took more care in their use of English and
showed more pride in their achievement than those for whom it is the native
tongue."
We might sometimes wonder if we are the most responsible custodians of our
own tongue, especially when we reflect that the Oxford University Press sells as
many copies of the Oxford English Dictionary in Japan as it does in America,
and a third more than in Britain.