Countries where birds don’t lay eggs: How Trump's 's***hole' remarks were translated around the world
Japan's Sankei translates the profanity as 'Benjo no yō ni kitanai kuni', meaning 'countries that are dirty like toilets'
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 56721.html
It was a debate that many journalists likely never expected to face: How to properly quote the president of the United States saying the words “s***hole countries”. Deciding what to do with his remarks – and whether to censor them in news reports – was tough enough for the press in the US. It was, after all, a vulgar phrase not usually fit for a newspaper or television.
But imagine trying to make sense of it in a different language. Every culture has its profanities, to be sure, but they do not always translate well.
The main daily newspapers in El Salvador, one of the countries maligned by the president, went with the translation “agujeros de mierda,” which essentially means “holes of s***.”
“Why do we have all these people from countries (who are a) hole of s*** coming here?” read Trump’s translated remarks, from the Spanish news agency EFE.
“It’s a bit literal,” one Spanish-speaking reader tweeted.
Some foreign news outlets took an easier approach – to disregard the “hole".
Most French media went with the phrase “pays de merde,” which essentially means “s***ty countries.”
In Finnish, one translation of the phrase was “persläpimaat”, which literally means “a***hole countries".
In Swahili, Trump’s phrase would likely be translated into “Bongo land”, a term used to describe poor or uncivilized places, Jan Blommaert, a Belgian linguistic anthropologist, told The Post. It’s a phrase considered disparaging by many. The phrase “Bongo Bongo Land”
was actually banned for its members by Ukip in 2013 after a member of European Parliament used it to describe countries receiving government aid.
Some of the oddest translations of Trump’s latest crudity showed up in Asian news outlets.
Taiwan’s Central News Agency went with niao bu sheng dan de guo jia, meaning “countries where birds don’t lay eggs”,
as Quartz pointed out. Japan’s Sankei used “Benjo no yō ni kitanai kuni”, meaning “countries that are dirty like toilets".
As Anna Fifield, Tokyo bureau chief for The Washington Post, noted, South Korean media had to spell out the word in English.
In Germany, a common translation was “drecksloch”, which conveys a garbage dump.
“We used that a lot back when he called the White House a dump (simpler times!), but it doesn’t work for countries,” one German interpreter argued on Twitter.
Reached by a reporter early on Friday morning, House, the linguist in Hamburg, said she hadn’t read Trump’s original words in English yet – only the translation in a German daily.
“Is it dirthole?” she asked.
Close, but not quite.
A fucking classic.