The Linguist

14 The Linguist Vol/60 No/6 2021 thelinguist.uberflip.com MEDIA WORK When journalists translate content, errors can be made that diminish trust and spread misinformation. Beatrice Murail investigates F rance's President Macron elicited smiles when he thanked Australian premier Malcolm Turnbull's "delicious" wife following his visit to their country in 2018. Only French speakers understood that he meant she was 'delightful', or délicieuse. But working in another language can do more than risk ridicule; it has led to diplomatic spats, if not war. Relations between the United States and France soured in 1830 when a translator in the White House rendered a request from Paris as a demand. A mistranslation by the French news agency Havas in 1870 was a trigger for the Franco-Prussian War. In 2008, a ceasefire agreement making provisions for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Georgia was drawn up in French, leaving journalists in English-speaking newsrooms to work out whether se retirer was the equivalent of 'pull back', 'withdraw' or 'pull out'. With the rise of fast online news, an increasing number of journalists around the world have been acting as de facto translators, often from English, and mistakes are ubiquitous. The French media is no exception. In April, one well-known daily released a story based on a report in The Guardian, which I had read a few days earlier. In it, John Le Carré's son explained that one of the last photos he has of the novelist is of him wrapped in an Irish flag "grinning his head off". In the French article, the son was said to have given Le Carré the photo wrapped in the Irish flag. I got in touch and the author admitted that he had no excuse for the errors, that he sometimes deletes "a few words or whole sentences by mistake". The story was updated on the website as a result, but no correction was issued. More damaging, perhaps, was when the BBC World Service broadcast a story in French urging people to get tested for le cancer des cervicales ('cervical vertebrae cancer'). The original item, in English, was of course about cervical cancer – so different from the French cancer de l'utérus that the journalist, improvising as a translator, could not work it out. The station's 10 million listeners in Francophone Africa must have ended up misinformed and confused about this important health warning. Web journalists have been inundating sites with Anglicisms and mistranslations, with many caused by 'false friends' such as this. Lemonde.fr reported recently that Covid-19 vaccine doses in Israel were about to expirer ('die') when they should have used the French equivalent of 'to expire': arriver à expiration. Journalists with no news translation expertise may not be aware of the issues they need to look out for. French language academics Elisabeth Lavault-Olléon and Véronique Sauron point out that a journalist's credibility is at stake. They give the example of lequipe.fr quoting the Spanish football star Gerard Piqué as saying that the Argentine player Lionel Messi was "tout petit et un peu débile" when he joined their club. In Spanish débil means 'frail', but the French débile now means 'silly'. "In this particular case, the journalist only brought their own credibility into doubt because the mistake was spotted almost immediately," says Lavault-Olléon. "When the mistake goes unnoticed, the image of the people referred to in an article may be tarnished." Sauron gives another example. Many readers expressed their outrage when, in 2007, liberation.fr carried the headline 'Quand John McCain rit de la "pute" Clinton' ('When John McCain makes fun of the "whore" Clinton'). In reality, an activist had asked the Republican senator "How do we beat the bitch?" and McCain had laughed along with the crowd. After readers suggested alternatives, the news outlet changed the headline. Media translation on the hoof is not just a French problem. For instance, The Guardian reported in May that President Macron was "expected to name France's first accredited ambassador to Rwanda in six years". But nommer is the equivalent of 'to appoint', Faux news?

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