"Button gaffe embarrasses Clinton" from BBC News reports that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov a gift that gave the Russian newspapers a few giggles.
Maybe Clinton should take some pointers on Russian from former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who is very fluent in Russian - what languages does Clinton speak?
Hillary Clinton gave Sergei Lavrov a mock "reset" button, symbolising US hopes to mend frayed ties with Moscow.
But he said the word the Americans chose, "peregruzka", meant "overloaded" or "overcharged", rather than "reset".
I totally sympathize with Secretary Clinton; I made a similar mistake due to language and cultural barriers with a new neighbor last summer. . .
Posted by: Bob W | March 07, 2009 at 04:01 PM
The Associated Press would like Americans to believe that our representatives have no clue what they are doing. Judging from comments on the various message forums Americans are gullibly buying the simplistic explanation that our State department supposedly doesn’t know how to translate the word “reset” into Russian. Nonsense! The Russian word peregruzka appears at the top of the button, spelled in latin letters. If this was meant to be a literal translation, why would the letters be in Latin? The english translation for this word is “overload” and anyone that knows how to type a few letters into an online translation website can easily figrue that much out. An english word appears below the button and that word is “reset”. These words do very much make sense together: when something is overloaded (like a circuit), you reset it.
Continued here:
http://rebellionbrewery.com/?p=312
Posted by: RebellionBrewery.com | March 07, 2009 at 07:12 PM