Interesting piece of political translation from today’s el Diario website in Spain.

In Trump’s rambling rants yesterday, he twice referred (according to the transcription by the UK-based Guardian newspaper) to ‘the Stone Ages’.

The Guardian always transcribes Trump’s illiterate utterances verbatim, in the interests of accuracy, but also (I assume) to emphasise the level of ignorance of the head of state the US electorate chose.

Spain’s el Diario - which is somewhat further to the left than The Guardian - translated this as ‘Edad de Piedra’, which is the correct Spanish term for ‘the Stone Age’, rather than the illiterate ‘Stone Ages’ (a primary-school-level confusion with the plural form ‘Middle Ages’).

At first glance, this looks like el Diario is sanitising Trump’s incoherence, but they didn’t really have much of a choice.

The Middle Ages are, in Spanish, ‘la Edad Media’ - singular, just as the other ‘ages’ of civilisation are (stone, bronze, etc.). So the literal translation ‘las Edades de Piedra’ would make no sense, and in fact heighten the mistake from being a dumb schoolkid mix-up, to complete ‘where the hell did he get that from?’ bollocks.

It’s a minor point, but a good reflection of how any translated message has political and diplomatic implications, in terms of how the reader of the target language will feel about the speaker of the source language.