Another bad translation from Italian? Check / monitor vs. control

Friday, January 30, 2009

Olivier wrote the following in a comment on an article on Mars the other day:

In fat, sav tu que li unésim hypothese de vit sur Mars es debit ad un miscomprension de traduction? Li astronom italian Schiaparelli, al fin del XIX° secul, hat dit il hat videt quam "canali" sur Mars. In italian, un "canale" poss esser tant artificial quam natural. Ma, in li altri lingues, on comprendet solmen li sensu artificial, e on imaginat li presentie de un civilisation sur ti planete!
For those that don't know Occidental, he wrote that at the end of the 19th century the Italian astronomy Schiaparelli wrote that he saw "canali" on Mars, but that in Italian a "canale" can be artificial as well as natural. However, when translated into other languages they assumed it referred to articifial canals from which the idea that Mars had canals came for quite some time until it was confirmed that these canals didn't exist, when it was really just a bad translation and nobody suggested that they existed in the first place.

Here's another article
from Italian:

(AGI) - Teheran, 28 Jan. - Despite openings announced by US president Barack Obama, Iran will not halt its nuclear programme. Sources within the presidency made the announcement.

During an interview in Teheran's government offices, Ahmadinejad's counsellor Aliakbar Javanfekr stated that Iran has no intention of stopping its nuclear activities, which are "peaceful and controlled by IAEA". To those citing the UN resolution asking for the suspension of uranium enriching activities, Javanfekr replied that "we are past that stage. We rejected the resolutions, which were developed under US pressure. We work in the context of international laws". He also defined sanctions imposed on Iran as "ineffective".
Controlled by the IAEA, hmm? I haven't see the original but I bet what it means to say is monitored, which is controlar in Occidental and in similar form in Romance languages too. Control in English would imply direct control, meaning that the IAEA is in charge of everything regarding these nuclear activities, which clearly isn't the case.

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