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Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Sergey, you're "overcharged"!

"No one is immune from an occasional linguistic faux pas. After all, everyone has sent out an email with a typo once in a while. It’s slightly more embarrassing when a language-related misstep is broadcast for the world to see, which is why we cringed upon reading about the goodwill gift that Secretary of State Clinton presented to Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov of Russia. The gift itself, which was meant to symbolize a resetting of the relationship between the two nations, contained an embarrassing mistranslation. Instead of bearing the term reset, (perezagruzka) the gift was labeled with the word peregruzka, which means overloaded or overcharged."
You can read the whole article HERE or try to imagine US and Romania walking "şold la şold" (a mistranslation of the English phrase "shoulder to shoulder" which made my day some years ago) towards our bright future together!

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