As reported by DW-World.de, a mistranslated statement by United States General David Petraeus, commander of the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, from a new set of guidelines for troops in Afghanistan, led some German government officials to believe that troops would be intensifying their involvement.
The online edition of the intellectual weekly paper Die Zeit headlined its story with the particularly vicious extract “Rip your teeth into the flesh of the insurgents.”
Berlin daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel by the same publisher concluded “targeted killings are apparently central to [Petraeus'] strategy.”
The respective dramatic headlines wouldn’t have been out of place in a tabloid, but were perceived as an oddity when they were posed by those two publications which are generally seen as a quality news source.
As it turns out, one sentence out of Petraus’ three-and-a-half page statement was not properly translated. In its original, it reads “Get your teeth into the insurgents and don’t let go.”
As you can see, this is simply a note of encouragement for troops to stay the course and not give up, rather than a call to violence.
While it is not clear whether a human translator was used who simply lacked the cultural background to properly understand this typical Amercan style statement and thereby was not able to properly translate it, or whether machine translation was used, with all its culprits, the incident serves as a powerful reminder to not cut corners but rather use a quality translation service, such as ours.
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