this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2025
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there was a series of articles during his first term where translators in (i think) india complained that it made them look bad, because they worked in one of those modal languages where politicians use a specific modus as a matter of course. since his speech is so erratic it was basically impossible to represent in that "political mode" and it made the translation look wrong, they stopped publishing what he said and just produced summaries edited to look correct.
i think about that a lot, especially in combination with polled populations in some countries being more in favour of don than others.
sidenote, i tried to find one of the articles i remember but that's all been overshadowed by an event from february in which he used a translator app on stage to try to understand what an indian reporter asked him in english.
Edit: found one: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/06/trump-translation-interpreters
i think i mixed things up a bit, the indian translators were indeed producing summaries because he was hard to translate but it was the japanese translators that had problems with modal speech. makes sense really.
I remember them talking about this. One translator was even quoted as saying Japanese doesn't have a slang word for pussy, which was just wrong. It's perhaps a bit more vulgar than they'd want to print in a newspaper but it's not quite as strong as cunt, or the was the US uses it anyway--maybe it's comparable to printing that in an Australian newspaper.