We all know that Donald Trump uses bombastic and hyperbolic speech, but how is it changing now that he’s a war president, Commander-in-Chief during a conflict that isn’t going the way he’d like?
“I am under the impression that Trump tries to maintain his credibility through language: ‘I’m going to erase a whole civilisation, I’m going to unleash, rain hell on you.’
So it’s like what he cannot do on the ground he’s doing through his words, through his language. So he keeps the language strong and violent to maintain his credibility as the commander-in-chief. And when translating, you have to maintain the same violent style. Otherwise, you lose the nuance of that.”
Those are the words of Desiree Berlangieri, a simultaneous translator who interprets Trump’s words for the Italian state broadcaster RAI. If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter, you’ll know that it focuses on how using English as the global language affects the way we see the world. Having listened to Trump being dubbed in other languages from his native English, I believe the translations often make him sound more coherent than he does in English, and I’ve spoken to Desiree about that in the past.
Six months into Trump’s war with Iran, this chat focuses specifically on how his war language has changed, and how to translate it faithfully so that non-English speakers get the same impact from his words that the Anglophone world does.
I always love reading your comment and the debates that develop, so there’s a comment button at the end and the transcript below the video.
TRANSCRIPT
BARBARA Desiree Berlangieri, welcome to News with a Foreign Accent. Thank you so much for speaking to me on the subject of translating Trump. Now, you are Simultaneous Interpreter for Rai TV, which is like the Italian BBC, the state broadcaster. And you get to translate Trump a lot. Tell us very briefly what it is that you do.
DESIREE Hello, Barbara. Thank you for having me. Yes, your comparison with BBC was right, meaning that I work for the Rai All News Channel. So I translate basically everything that happens in the world. And these last few months, Trump has been the main character of any story. so I’ve been translating him a lot and that poses a lot of challenges I have to say although I was used to him because this is not his first term I was his interpreter during his first term as well but now things have changed around him there are wars so the languages become more violent and also when it comes to Trump it’s difficult to apply those techniques that you learn as an interpreting student which are mainly compression and anticipation and because it’s hard. Anticipating Trump is very difficult. Absolutely. It’s hard to predict what he’s going to say. So you really have to concentrate on content and the form as well because you have to adjust what he says to the target language. And sometimes you have to change things around a little bit so that what you say can be understood by an Italian audience in my case because I translate into Italian.
BARBARA I have to say that whenever I hear and watch Trump when he’s being translated I always feel that he sounds more coherent because the way that he speaks is often so disjointed so unpredictable and actually I think that there’s like a veneer of predictability, respectability, coherence whenever he actually is translated. Do you find that when you interpret what he says, especially when you’re alive, that somehow you, not quite embellish him, but change the way that he’s perceived, not because you want to, but just by virtue of translating him?
DESIREE Yes, absolutely. Sometimes I do that because when in a sentence you hear five or six times the word said, bad, beautiful, terrible, you have to come up with synonyms at least and not to make it too repetitive for those who listen. So maybe that goes to his advantage, yes.
BARBARA So let’s look in detail at some of the things that he has said because like you say, things have changed a lot during the war. I’m just thinking of Open the fucking strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in hell. Just watch. This is threatening Iran over the Strait of Hormuz. Now, you wouldn’t have been live because he wasn’t saying it. It was a post. But I’m just wondering, in the translations that you have seen, what was translated and what do you think the impact change is?
DESIREE Okay, luckily I didn’t have to say that out loud, but if he said that during a speech, I would have not been allowed to say the F word, not even the Italian version of it, because it just sounds bad. It’s offensive and it’s rude.
BARBARA But he IS offensive and he’s rude!
DESIREE I know, I know, but it’s still, it’s really damaging to your ears. I don’t know how to explain it. It’s really, really important. No, no, I get that, believe me. And so whenever I heard different news channels reporting the news, they would show on screen what he wrote And sometimes they would also mask the F word with asterisks and other signs But nobody, when they had to read it out loud in Italian this time, would use the F word Because it’s just too rude, it’s not television language because we’re not watching a movie or something, although sometimes he does speak like he’s in a movie. A violent one, I have to say.
BARBARA Don’t you think that that’s the difference, though, that in English, and it’s a lot of phrases as well that are used, not just by Trump, by Pete Hegseth, it is stuff that comes from the movies. In Pete Hegseth’s case, quite literally, quite recently, when it was a Bible quote that actually came from Pulp Fiction.
DESIREE Yes, absolutely. They... I think it’s intentional they want to make it look like it’s a movie because people know that then Americans are the good guys and they will win in the end so probably it’s intentional but I have to say that even my way of translating him I mean Trump has changed a little bit in the last few months since the war in Iran started because he has become more violent with his language. And I think I have to reflect that into Italian because you have to convey all the nuances of the messages that they speak when they give a speech. So I’ve been repeating things more verbatim, using less synonyms. And if he talks like a war movie, I’ll talk like a war movie.
BARBARA And you didn’t do that before.
DESIREE Not as much because sometimes it’s also difficult to understand what the reference is because you would have to explain. And as an interpreter, you don’t really explain.
BARBARA As in like what the movie is and what the actual culture is.
DESIREE Because you have to be as invisible as possible. So when that happens, when there’s an exact quotation of a book or a movie, either you know the Italian version of it, the title of a book or a movie, or you just see it in English and hope people know what you’re talking about.
BARBARA Okay. Again, it’s the same point that you’ve made, but how have you felt... Trump has always been eccentric and his way of speaking has always been eccentric and predictable, quite strange. But have you felt that since the start of the war in Iran, when we heard him say things like, you know, he’s going to destroy your civilization or... you know open the fucking straight you crazy bastards and that kind of language and obviously what went what went with it a war and attacks that the way that you translate has changed that you are now maybe perhaps reflecting the impact of his words and not just the words themselves
DESIREE That’s what I try to do, and I am under the impression that he tries to maintain his credibility through language as well, because as we all know, he’s been announcing a ceasefire, and then after two hours he wrote something like, I’m going to erase a whole civilization, I’m going to unleash rain hell on you, you know, all those things. So it’s like what he cannot do on the ground is doing through his words, through his language. So he keeps the language strong and violent to maintain his credibility as the commander-in-chief. And when translating, you have to maintain the same violent style. Otherwise, you lose the nuance of that.
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BARBARA All right. Is there anything else you want to say that I haven’t asked you?
DESIREE There is always one thing that strikes me when it comes to American political language, which is how it’s intertwined with religion. There are so many references to religion that we absolutely did not have an Italian. No Italian politician would ever end a speech saying, God bless Italy.
BARBARA Same thing in the UK. Famously, Alistair Campbell, who used to work with Tony Blair, said, we don’t do God. So, I mean, it’s not just Italy. I think it’s maybe a European thing.
DESIREE So it’s like they feel invested with this holy charge from God to improve the world, to make the world a better place. Because again, what is reflected in American war movies, they’re the good guys saving the world.
BARBARA Well, we’ll see what happens to the world when it all unfolds. Desiree, grazie mille!
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