Japan’s Interpreters Struggle to Make Sense of ‘Trumpese’ | Japan Times
Funny and depressing article from Japan Times Staff Writer Tomohiro Osaki.
As political leaders in Japan pay close attention to how U.S. President Donald Trump will go in office, so, too, are interpreters who have had a nightmarish experience translating his disjointed speeches.
“He rarely speaks logically, and he only emphasizes one side of things as if it were the absolute truth. There are lots of moments when I suspected his assertions were factually dubious,” said Chikako Tsuruta, who routinely covers Trump-related news as an interpreter for CNN, ABC and CBS.
“He is so overconfident and yet so logically unconvincing that my interpreter friends and I often joke that if we translated his words as they are, we would end up making ourselves sound stupid,” Tsuruta, who is also a professor of interpreting and translation studies at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, said in a recent interview.
Like Tsuruta, English-Japanese interpreters recall being dumbstruck by Trump’s disregard for logic and facts as well as his unabashed use of a litany of sexist and racist remarks during the election campaign.
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Particularly symbolic of this characteristic, Tsuruta said, was Trump’s inauguration speech, which she said was peppered with everyday vocabulary, perhaps with the exception of “carnage.”
In addition, the businessman uncharacteristically used a teleprompter and read from a script, which made the Jan. 20 speech flow coherently enough, the professor noted.
But it’s when he speaks off-the-cuff, Tsuruta said, that interpreters are most likely to find themselves scratching their heads, with Trump frequently jumping from one topic to another and gravitating toward insults and vulgarities.
Miwako Hibi, a broadcast interpreter of more than 20 years, said it was “very hard” to follow Trump’s logic — or lack thereof — particularly his tendency to mention proper nouns out of context.
More: Japan’s interpreters struggle to make sense of ‘Trumpese’ | The Japan Times