File this under “Annals of Translation”. The way a word is translated makes a big difference in how a story is covered outside of the country where that language is spoken. Here’s a good example. France’s president, Emmanuel Macron, used a word that can be translated in a crude way and in a fairly mild way. Not only did his doing this end up making the news because of the severe restrictions he is planning to place on the unvaccinated, but also because of one word he used: emmerder.
Many of you are probably familiar with the word for “shit” in French:
Add a few letters and you get emmerder. The Collins French-English Dictionary defines it as follows:
* (=importuner) to bug *
ça m'emmerde! it pisses me off!
* (=ennuyer) to bore stiff
Ces cours m'emmerdent. These lessons bore me stiff.
**, comme insulte je t'emmerde! fuck you! **
je les emmerde! they can piss off! ** (Grande-Bretagne) , they can go to hell! * (USA)
emmerder_s'
vpr/vi
** (=s'ennuyer) to be bored shitless ** , to be bored stiff
This story was reported in The New York Times with this title: Macron under fire after arguing France should make life miserable for the unvaccinated.
Excerpt: President Emmanuel Macron of France drew fierce criticism on Wednesday after bluntly arguing that the government should make life miserable for the unvaccinated, as skyrocketing infection rates have put him under pressure to rein in the coronavirus pandemic ahead of a key presidential election.
“I really want to piss off the unvaccinated,” Mr. Macron said in an interview with the newspaper Le Parisien. “And so we are going to continue doing that, until the end.”
Mr. Macron said that those who had refused coronavirus vaccines were part of a small minority. About three-quarters of France’s 67 million people are fully vaccinated, but roughly five million French people have not received a single shot.
“I’m not going to put them in prison,” he said. “I’m not going to vaccinate them by force.”
Instead, the government is pushing a bill through Parliament that will tighten the eligibility of France’s health pass by no longer allowing people to obtain one with negative tests. The pass grants access to restaurants, cafes, museums and other public spaces.
According to HuffPost President Macron didn't use the term “piss off:”
Macron used the French word “emmerder,” rooted in the French word for “crap” and meaning to rile or to bug, in an interview published by French newspaper Le Parisien on Tuesday night. The president made the explosive remark as lawmakers are heatedly debating new measures that would allow only the vaccinated to enjoy leisure activities such as eating out. Article: Emmanuel Macron Uses A Vulgarity To Berate France's Unvaccinated People — French President Emmanuel Macron used salty language to describe his strategy for pressuring vaccine refusers to get coronavirus shots.
This is how NBC News put it with a focus on the language he used: “Macron’s language about the unvaccinated provokes a storm in France — The French president also said unvaccinated people were ‘irresponsible’ and that he planned to make their lives so complicated that they would end up getting inoculated.” NBC News)
The term Macron used in the interview, which was published shortly before lawmakers were to resume a debate over the new legislation, is a vulgar word that is often translated as “piss off” but can also mean “get on someone's nerves.”
You can scan through the titles of the articles that come up on a Google search of this story. You will see that the word emmerder is translated in various ways from “pissed off” to “make their lives miserable” to “get on one’s nerves”.
This is from The Times of Israel:
The Times of Israel gets my award for the most clever titling because of putting “IRRITABLE BOWEL” in red letters on the upper left. I enlarged them in my illustration.
Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), referred to previously as spastic or nervous colon, and spastic bowel, is a functional gastrointestinal disorder characterized by a group of symptoms accompanied together that include abdominal pain and changes in the consistency of bowl movements. Wikipedia
While irritable bowl is a medical term it sounds too much like annoyed intestine. Had it been up to me I would have used the more descriptive term spastic colon.
President Biden has had enough trouble trying to implement vaccine mandates, as well as testing and mask requirements. I can only imagine if he had gone as far as President Macron who has expectedly caused the far right French politicians like Marine Le Pen (below) to go ballistic in their condemnations of him.
Here’s a story from the very far right website USSA News which bills itself as The Tea Party's Front Page (Media Bias Factcheck):
Excerpt:
In perhaps his strongest and boldest move yet, Emmanuel Macron has openly declared the unvaccinated in France to the the enemy of the state, using the word “emmerder” to describe his feelings toward the unvaccinated. For those of you who do not speak French, the word ’emmerder’ literally means to “dip in s***”, evoking raw images of how the Jews were treated at places like Auschwitz and Sachsenhausen in Nazi Germany.
“And the king shall do according to his will; and he shall exalt himself, and magnify himself above every god, and shall speak marvellous (sic) things against the God of gods, and shall prosper till the indignation be accomplished: for that that is determined shall be done.” Daniel 11:36 (KJB)
We told you how last year, Emmanuel Macron was the first world leader to threaten his citizens if they refused to take the vaccine, and that threat worked quite well as over 6 million French rushed out to take it. After he was successfully able to pull that off, many other world leaders followed his lead, imposing vaccine mandates on their own people. Now that Macron has declared open war on the French unvaccinated, how long will it be until that begins to become to policy around the world? What you are watching his Emmanuel Macron’s “pre-game warmup” to stepping into his role as the biblical man of sin. Just my humble opinion, and you better pray I’m wrong. But I don’t think that, by this point, I am. Tick, tock…