Translation gets in the way of the message..

Translators and students of foreign languages are familiar with the problem of what the French call faux amis (translators’ false friends) – words that have the same origin and often look and sound the same but mean different things in different languages. Examples include the English word anecdote and the Russian “anekdot” (a joke) or velvet – in Russian “velvet” stands for corduroy.

Things get a little trickier and sometimes downright difficult when some meanings coincide and others diverge. A direc-tor, for example, is “direktor” in Russian when he is a member of a company’s board of directors but not when he is a film director (that will be a “rezhisser”); a Russian “director shkoly” is a school principal in America or a headmaster in Britain. A Russian “student” goes to college; in America, he might just as well be a 10-year-old schoolboy.

Experienced translators and interpreters are well aware of such words and, even though they are quite numerous (try Russian faux amis for accurate, carton, decade, novel, or revision) we very rarely confuse them. Language learners may be reasonably sure that as their proficiency improves they will get the right word almost automatically.

There is, however, a less well known but insidious problem: Take the word leadership, which is often translated into Russian as “rukovodstvo”. In nine cases out of 10, it is a mistranslation, for this Russian word means guidance, management, or even control.

So when a phrase frequently used by American politicians – US global leadership – is translated, sometimes deliberately and maliciously, as “amerikanskoye rukovodst-vo mirom” – something very close to American control of the world – it conjures up all kinds of nasty associations in the minds of most Russian readers.

The right Russian word is of course “liderstvo”. The word leader was borrowed from English decades ago and equipped with Russian suffixes to create derivatives – a verb, an adjective, and a noun. So Russian translators are in this particular case luckier than, say, the French, who simply have no equivalent for the English word; English-French dictionaries therefore recommend roundabout ways of conveying this concept.

When Americans speak of someone’s “leadership role” the meaning is best conveyed in Russian by the word “initsiativnost”. Sounds familiar? It’s because we both borrowed the word “initiative” from French.