If there is a person analogous to Bill Buckner in the world of translation and interpreting, it is Steven Seymour. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter took Seymour – an interpreter provided by the State Department – with him on an official visit to Poland. Seymour was a distinguished literary translator from Russian and Polish, but he had little experience of doing formal interpreting.*
The results were both comical and offensive. Carter expressed his desire to know more about the Polish people’s aspirations; Seymour told them (in Polish) that the President was expressing his erotic desire for them. Carter was not exactly reticent about such matters – he famously told Playboy in an interview that he had “committed adultery in my heart many times” – but propositioning all the people of Poland at once was not his intention. (According to this Polish source, Carter via Seymour even expressed his lust for the wife of Edward Gierek, Poland’s Communist leader of the time.)
Seymour also rendered Carter’s innocent “when I left the United States” as “when I abandoned the United States forever.” Was Jimmy preparing to ask for political asylum in Poland? While Carter praised Poland’s 1791 constitution, Seymour described that document as “a joke.” Seymour’s mistakes weren’t simply incorrect; they were downright insulting, which was potentially disastrous in a diplomatic context. Seymour was relieved of his interpreting duties after this incident, and replaced by an official interpreter from the Polish side.**
Yet on the page, Seymour was a skilled professional. He was a successful and highly respected translator of poetry, for example. Translating poetry is a much bigger challenge than translating the mundane language of political speeches. Seymour was married to the Russian poet Vera Pavlova, and translated her work, among other things. As far as I can tell, he was as deserving of the esteem he enjoyed as a translator as Bill Buckner was as a baseball player.
There are two lessons here: the State Department should have vetted its interpreters more carefully, and Seymour shouldn’t have taken such a high-level job without being sure of his abilities. Unfortunately, I see little evidence that the State Department has changed its ways. As recently as 2009, when the Obama administration attempted to reset relations with Russia, they translated “reset” as peregruzka – which means “overload.” Even worse, the word was emblazoned in Roman letters (not Cyrillic) on a cheap-looking plastic red button presented to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov.
Thanks in part to Buckner’s error, the Mets won the World Series. However, nobody wins from a translation error. Misunderstandings are bad for everyone, and potentially catastrophic.
*This is another instance of something I’ve mentioned before – not understanding the difference between translators and interpreters.
**If you can read Polish, you can find Seymour’s actual colorful renderings into that language on this Polish translator’s blog here.