You know what? This story has been bothering me for days.
Just about every news source had a chuckle over it. Hillary Clinton, newly acting in her role as the head of the State Department, met with her Russian counterpart in Geneva and handed him a gag gift which was supposed to be a “reset” button, signifying a desire to begin anew with diplomatic relations. The gag gift however had the wrong word on it, saying “overload” rather than “reset.”
That is the entire story. It’s a one-minute blip thing and I read it as such originally and went onto other things. But the more I thought about it, the more it stuck in my craw.
The first thing that bothered me was of course the fact that during a major diplomatic effort to renew or strengthen ties, the State Department, the agency literally tasked with nothing but relations with foreign countries, couldn’t find a single word correctly.
The second thing that bothered me was this:
“We worked hard to get the right Russian word,” Mrs. Clinton said, handing the button to Mr. Lavrov. “Do you think we got it?”
Worked hard on it? Really? Was that tongue in cheek or what?
Then I got a look at the actual button itself:
What the hell is that? It looks like some children’s toy where someone used a label maker to slap on two words. Ok I get it, it’s a gag gift, but still that thing looks really odd and cheap and something a low-level intern probably had to put together at the last minute.
But what’s even weirder is that the word in Russian is spelled using the western alphabet. Which makes sense if it’s some American low-level staffer slapping this thing together at the last minute with a Brother labelmaker, etc.
But what doesn’t make sense is that any Russian-English dictionary will give the result in the Russian alphabet. If you look up the word “reset” in any of the online dictionaries I found, the word is always given as перезагрузка. The incorrect word, “overload” is given as перегрузка not “peregruzka” as you see in the photo.
Now why does this matter? Aren’t I just splitting hairs? Aren’t foreign languages often different and don’t have exact word-for-word translations? Yes of course.
But in this case it isn’t. “Peregruzka” means overload and “perezargruzka” means to “reset.” There isn’t any ambiguity. There’s no subtle shades of meaning. They don’t even come from the same etymological root. No speaker of Russian would ever confuse them, any more than an English speaker would confuse the words “chicken” and “kitchen”.
Here’s what had to have happened. Someone high in the State Department (including HRC herself) said, “Hey I got a funny idea. Let’s give Lavrov a little reset button to make a gag off Biden’s little recent speech.” Word goes on down to the interns or drudges to make one up so HRC can give it to Lavrov for a little laugh.
Ok, so far so good. But somewhere along the line someone had to ask, “What’s the word in Russian for reset?” And someone had to look it up and then “translate” it into the western alphabet.
Ok so maybe, maybe just maybe some poor uniformed drudge of a low-level intern looked up the word, translated the letters one for one with the western alphabet and had no idea what s/he was doing from start to finish. But the NYT adds:
State Department officials professed not to know who was responsible for the error. But Mrs. Clinton was accompanied by several diplomats and White House officials who had lived in Russia and speak Russian — any of whom conceivably could have caught it.
Indeed. And this was in preparation for a major and extremely important diplomatic meeting with the Russian foreign minister. Surely someone had seen that thing before it was handed to Lavrov. Surely it would’ve been something to cause some laughs on the plane. It’s a funny gag gift! Why not?
Then you get this seemingly snide follow-up:
Clinton adviser Philippe Reines said the typo would be fixed, noting that the correct translation for “reset” is only a couple letters off.
Well “close” only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, not on something this important. I mean everything from intercontinental ballistic missiles to Iran was on the agenda plus a series of other things (such as I suspect, supply routes into Pakistan for the U.S. military).
I don’t know, maybe I am making a mountain out of a molehill here. It just seems to me a pretty poor way to start off on the right foot with such an important diplomatic effort. And this comes on top of Хиллари Клинтон, excuse me, Hillary Clinton misquoting the Roman playwright Terrance a few weeks ago during her confirmation hearings.
Time to buy the folks at Foggy Bottom a few damn dictionaries!
Pax
