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The Marketing of Yoani Sánchez: Translation as invention

“There are no accidents.” – Sigmund Freud

Por Manuel Talens

As one might have expected, Bloomberg and Reuters dutifully shaded their reports on the recent visit to Cuba of Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff with mentions of the Yoani Sánchez Twitter campaign to pressure Rousseff to intercede on Sánchez’s behalf and persuade the Cuban government to grant her an exit visa to attend a propaganda event in Brazil. That’s not so surprising. Sánchez is an egomaniac, for sure, insisting that anyone should care in the first place, when her compatriots Olga Salanueva and Adriana Pérez O’Connor have been denied entry visas by the United States for more than a decade to visit their husbands (Rene Gonzalez Sehwerert and Gerardo Hernández Nordelo, two of the Cuban Five), unjustly imprisoned in the U.S. – but if all she has to do is tweet and the press come running, judging the tweet as equal in value to Rousseff’s criticisms of the U.S. gulag at Guantánamo, well, that’s not really her fault – it’s just part of a marketing plan that counts on press complicity. The interesting thing about this particular tweet however, was the way that the English language press went above and beyond simple translation and repetition, entering the realm of treacherous pure invention. It’s hard to tell where the invention originated though, since both Bloomberg and Reuters used the same “mistranslation” – nearly word for word. Matthew Bristow and Cris Valerio, reporting for Bloomberg, wrote it this way:

The 36-year-old Sanchez, a critic of Castro’s government on a blog called Generation Y, referred to Rousseff’s persecution by Brazil’s 1964-1985 dictatorship in her appeal for a visa to attend a screening in Salvador of a documentary she appears in. Sanchez has been blocked from traveling abroad for the past four years. “I saw a photo of young Dilma, sitting on a bench blindfolded as men accused her,” Sanchez wrote Jan. 24 on Twitter. “I feel that way right now.”

Jeff Franks, for Reuters, wrote:

Last week, Sanchez wrote on Twitter that she had seen a photograph of “young Dilma, sitting on a bench blindfolded as men accused her. I feel that way now.”

A compelling image, for sure. A young blindfolded woman, harassed by barking men. Compelling, except for the fact that such a photo doesn’t actually exist. An accurate translation might have been:

“I saw a photo of the young Dilma seated in the dock for the accused and being judged by men who were covering their faces. That’s how I feel right now.”

Specifically, the mistranslation repeated by Bloomberg and Reuters interpreted the Spanish verb tapar, which means to cover, as vendar, which means to blindfold. It’s hardly an innocent error given the circumstances of a military trial. But the altered meaning is even worse in English, given that it’s not the accusing judges who are described as “covering their faces,” but Dilma Rousseff who is portrayed as “blindfolded.” Not to mention Sánchez’s weak grammar in the original Spanish which b

2 Comments

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  1. Jerone Stephens / Yoaniisatotalfraud

    Great article. Yoani is clearly a fraud who is nothing but a parrot for U.S. interests. Her little book of blogs leaves out the report of her visit to the polyclinic after her supposed “beating”. The so called book also leaves out the supposed questions and answers of Yoani to Obama and we know why. The editor, Mary Jo Porter does not speak Spanish, and we never know who is translating the blogs. We assume it is someone in the USIS or in Maryland at the NSA. We still need to know who is paying for her server in Germany; I am sure it is an agent of the U.S. government, or a fascist from Miami.

        
  2. Tim

    while all the money and the attention rolls in, i don’t think Yoani will care what Cubans think