Help from Fox and Friends
Trump probably got that stupid and venomous claim that the tube bombing was carried out by “sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard” from Fox and Friends.
At 6:42 a.m., Mr. Trump tweeted that “sick and demented people who were in the sights of Scotland Yard” carried out the explosion, which left 29 people injured in the blast and ensuing panic. It was not clear where Mr. Trump had gotten that information, though 23 minutes earlier, “Fox and Friends,” a program Mr. Trump regularly watches, broadcast a report in which an outside security analyst said the London police probably already knew the identity of the attackers.
“Can someone tell Scotland Yard?” asked Brian Kilmeade, one of the hosts of the program.
So that’s probably what put the idea in Trump’s empty head. Fox said it so it must be true, because Fox said it.
White House officials said they did not know whether “Fox and Friends” was the source for Mr. Trump. They tried to play down the contretemps, saying Mr. Trump’s tweet was referring to the longstanding efforts of British law enforcement authorities to investigate would-be terrorists, not to anyone involved in Friday’s attack.
“What the president was communicating is that obviously all of our law enforcement efforts are focused on this terrorist threat for years,” said the national security adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster. “Scotland Yard has been a leader, as our F.B.I. has been a leader.”
Nope. That’s not what he was communicating at all.
The police in London also alluded to the president’s Twitter post. “This is a live investigation and we will provide further updates as it progresses,” the Metropolitan Police said in a statement.
“Any speculation is extremely unhelpful at this time,” the statement said.
Well that’s Trump – here to be unhelpful!
That actually makes no sense whatsoever. Leaving aside the implicit idea that terrorism is the only crime, thus enabling law agencies to focus exclusively on terrorism, for that sentence to be grammatically correct he should have said that their efforts either have been or will be focused for years.
Is it a requirement that Trump’s people have as poor a grasp on the language as their boss?
We joke, but that may not be far off the truth.
Translators have had a problem with Trump. They’re careful users of language, and normally generate translations that are fine examples of the use of the language they are translating into. But doing that with inputs from Trump fails to convey either the crappy quality of his English or the scattered content of his thinking, so they risk making him sound too much better than he should and inserting more rationality than is present in the original.
Ms. Huckabee Sanders has the same challenge paraphrasing him from English to English. She still cleans it up somewhat, but she’s very good at retaining the batshit craziness and fairly good at retaining the miserable formal value of his utterances. She may not experience it as a challenge the way that professional translators do; I suspect she’s a more natural mouthpiece for the Orange Hate Clown than they are. McMaster, in this case, is probably just in a hurry and not especially thoughtful, which happens to be a fine place for relaying Trump’s ideas too.
@Jeff Engel: I am reminded of the piece “Lost In Trumpslation”[0] about an interviewer who desribes the difficulty in translating Donnie’s ramblings. One particularly notable paragraph:
[0] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/lost-in-trumpslation-an-interview-with-berengere-viennot/#!
No; ‘unhelpful’ was the Archbishop of Canterbury saying that he’s praying for the people affected by the incident, instead of ordering the local churches to be opened for the refugees, quite unlike the way local mosques were opened for refugees from the Grenfell Tower inferno.
Speculation by a foreign head of state in regards to an ongoing investigation is actively hindering to the process.
Karellen, that’s something I remarked on a few months ago during Trump’s first official jaunt to foreign lands.
Do translators clean up his poor vocabulary, making him sound like a normal, verbally capable human, or do they translate verbatim, risking being thought of as being poor translators?
Also, another problem has just occurred to me; if we native English speakers often have to work hard to try and make sense of his disjointed, barely coherent ramblings, how in Hell are the translators supposed to relay that to an audience in real time at international conferences and so on where instant translation is essential?