When a Preposition Changes a Proposition

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Posted by Donald A. DePalma on September 8, 2008 in the following blogs: Translation and Localization, Business Globalization, Best Practices
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Earlier this year, we rehashed some oft-cited translation mishaps and introduced a few new ones. On Sunday, the Washington Times reported on a diplomatic mistranslation that explains why the Russians aren't living up to the terms of the French-brokered peace plan for Georgia and Russia. What's up in the Caucuses?

France's Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner confirmed that a "translation problem had contributed to differences in interpreting a Russia-Georgia peace plan." Over the weekend, Koucher confirmed an anonymous Russian official's diagnosis of the problem: The peace plan was originally written in French, and was then translated into English and Russian. Along the way, a lowly preposition was changed – and thus modified the document's intent.

According to the Washington Times, "the main linguistic glitch was in a passage in the Russian version that spoke of security for South Ossetia and Abkhazia, whereas the English version spoke of security in the two areas." The Georgians got the English version. Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that "the cease-fire agreement contained numerous distortions," one of which was the replacement of the preposition "for" with "in."

Given the number of words in any such peace plan, the fact that a simple preposition could derail discussions made us think of Ben Franklin's famous aphorism, "For the want of a nail, the shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for the want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for the want of care about a horseshoe nail." Every word matters.

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