Say what? President Trump confounds translators

When the video was released capturing a younger Donald Trump making lewd comments about women, news outlets across the country struggled with how to present the crude words.

“Grab them by the p---y,” Trump said in the recording, the Washington Post reported. “You can do anything.”

Around the world, reporters and translators dealt with a more complex dilemma: how to make sense of the shocking conversation in a different language.

In Chinese, for example, one language expert, David Moser, has argued there is no obvious way to say the word “p---y.” Some news outlets published more sanitized versions using references to “private places.”

“You can even play with their nether parts; anything goes,” was the rough translation in one Chinese media outlet.

Others opted for simply including the censored English word, “use p---y to grab them.”

Since the beginning of his political rise, Trump's remarks have been translated into a slew of languages worldwide, and his official swearing in only elevates the power of his words. For some, his simple vocabulary and grammatical structure make his speeches easy to follow. But for others, his confusing logic, his tendency to jump quickly from topic to topic and his lack of attributions for so-called facts make his remarks sound like a puzzling jumble, and creates a headache when translating Trump's speeches for non-English audiences.

Bérengère Viennot, a professional French translator, said in a recent interview with the LA Review of Books that Trump's broken syntax, often limited vocabulary and repetition of phrases makes it difficult to create texts that read coherently in French, a very structured and logical language.

“Most of the time, when he speaks he seems not to know quite where he's going,” Viennot said. “It's as if he had thematic clouds in his head that he would pick from with no need of a logical thread to link them.”

She is left with a dilemma: either translate Trump exactly as he speaks - and let French readers struggle with the content - or keep the content, but smooth out the style, “so that it is a little bit more intelligible, leading non-English speakers to believe that Trump is an ordinary politician who speaks properly.”

In Japanese, a structural challenge also exists when translating Trump's words. Agness Kaku, a professional translator based in Tokyo who has worked for a number of politicians, said in an interview with the Post that English is a subject-prominent language - understanding a sentence in English involves pinning down who or what the subject is. Japanese, on the other hand, requires tracking the topic of a conversation.

In Trump's remarks, Kaku said, the subject is very easy to keep track of - “it's about him, it's about the enemy.” But the actual topic or point of his sentences is often difficult to grasp, making Japanese translations difficult. “It just drifts,” she said.

The most instrumental phrase in Trump's rhetoric - his slogan, “Make American Great Again,” creates a grammatical and semantic mess for translators in some languages, according to an article in the Spanish newspaper El País. In Spanish, for example, one intuitive translation, Haz América grande otra vez, could also come across as “Make America big again,” or “Do America great again.”

To make matters worse, most Spanish-speakers - and Portuguese speakers - believe América usually implies the whole of the Americas, not just the United States. This became an important distinction for Renato Geraldes, a professional interpreter in Brazil who translated Trump's inauguration address into Portuguese for Brazilian television. In Trump's closing words, the president gave several variations of his campaign slogan, ending with “And yes, together we will make America great again.”

Geraldes, interpreting live on television, was forced to speak very quickly during these final lines, since the interpretation in Portuguese became much clunkier and longer, along the lines of “together, we will turn the United States into great again.”

However, the speech was not quite as difficult to interpret as it could have been, Geraldes saidt. Based on Trump's previous speeches, Geraldes worried Trump would veer off-topic, following his usual scattered way of speaking. Geraldes, who has also interpreted Barack Obama's speeches, said Obama was unparalleled in his public speaking, in large part because he had a natural ability to guide audiences through the speech.