Saturday, January 01, 2005

Error in Translation

The Vatican did not slam Israel after all. It slammed Sri Lanka for refusing Israeli aid, and the controversy was caused by a Catholic World News mistranslation of an article in L’Osservatore Romano. Here is the corrected article.

(Personal bit here: I translate news for a living. When I found out that the whole uproar was caused by a mistranslation, I couldn’t help thinking: There but for the grace of God ...)

Meryl has more, ending with this wise observation:

In any case, I see that the false news story is spreading far beyond the original CWN site. I’m doing my part to correct the error and stop people from falsely blaming the Vatican for slamming Israel. Relations between Israel and Rome have been shaky enough over the years. We don’t need to make them worse.

Here’s to better understanding (and translations, including mine) in 2005.

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