The Obama administration wants to reset US relations with Russia, and in a symbolic gesture Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented her counterpart, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a huge RESET button when the met in Geneva.
Except the button did not really say reset: it said перегрузка (peregruzka), which, as Lavrov pointed out means overload. Now, we don’t want to overload relations with Russia, do we?
Congratulations for the State Department translatorss for getting it right. Here’s my bailout proposal for State: fire the translators, just use Google Translate:
“We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?”
Do you really think, Hillary said it without any particular intention? Of course, they all know meaning of both russian words and even didn’t write the word in cyrillics.
It is diplomacy. Nothing is casual.
Two letters – “za” make all the difference!
They confused the Russian words “perezagruzka” with “peregruzka”.
perezagruzka = reboot, restart
peregruzka = overload
Whoops. Russian verbs can be very difficult. May be a good reason to find some native speakers to help out in situations like this.
-Alex
Zat’s it 🙂
@Zoli, do you speak Russian?
-Alex
Nyet… I grew up where it was mandatory for schoolkids, but never really learned it.