 |
| If you find this difficult to read, remember you can expand it to full screen (as you can any other picture in this blog) by single-clicking on the image |
This blogger has been not blogging recently as I have been
finishing a novel, which will shortly amaze the world. But while working on my
manuscript I have been assiduously collecting examples of misused English and
am now going to post a lot of short entries describing them. Soon after that I
shall be going on holiday to Scotland for five weeks, where the demands of
family, friends, fun and frolics will no doubt mean that my entry-per-month
rate will drop.
The first piece comes from the War Museum at Poklonny Gori
where I went with some interesting friends on 22 June to mark the date of the
German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. There were all sorts of
explanatory notices around the exhibition, many of them in English. Not for the
first time, I remarked to one of the friends I went with (who is Russian but
speaks flawless English) how odd it is that Russians spend so much money on
displays like that at Poklonny Gori but then skimp on the texts. From a public
relations point of view, nothing could be more silly than having badly-written
foreign language material. When will Russia start to spend the trivial amounts
money needed to have proper foreign language experts, like me(!), check their
texts for public consumption?
I will come to the language in a minute, but the first point
to note is that most of the material at Poklonny Gori was also historically
inaccurate. The piece pictured above, which I have chosen simply because my
photograph of it produced the most legible image, starts with the bizarre assertion
(second paragraph) that: “From the very start [of the war “against the axis”]
the Soviet Union exerted significant efforts to achieve a wide military and
political co-operation with all countries in the state of war against Germany.”
Huh! From the start? Do Russians not know that the
war against Germany started in September 1939, nearly two years before Hitler
decided to force the Soviet Union to fight against him rather than help him? Do
they not know that Stalin twice asked to join the Axis (in 1940) and speculated
in smirking tones about how they would be able to carve up the British Empire
“like an estate in bankruptcy” once Britain had been beaten? Do they not know
that in the battle of Britain—as much a turning point in the war as the Battle
of Stalingrad was—the German air force was flying on fuel largely supplied by
the Soviet Union and using rubber, a key material, which it could obtain only
buy getting the USSR to buy it from (British) India pretending it was for its
own consumption?
Stalin did everything he could to help Hitler defeat the
British Empire (remember the United States w as not in the war until December
1941). To say that “from the very start” the USSR tried to defeat Hitler
is such a gross distortion of history that it renders the whole monument at
Poklonny Gori decidedly questionable, to me at any rate. Why does Russia feel
it needs to lie about its own military history?
The first rule of etiquette in writing in English, as in any
other language, is to respect truth, and therefore the reader by not treating him or
her as an idiot, which this kind of historical nonsense does.
A secondary rule which is rather amusingly broken in the
piece is to get names and other obviously checkable material right. Towards the
end, reference is made to the Dumbarton Oaks conference in 1944 at which the
first proposals were discussed for the establishment of what became the United
Nations. This document refers to a “conference in Dumbarton-Ox”, which I
thought rather funny.
No comments:
Post a Comment