If we were just a little self-deprecating, in this Innovation Almanac, we should celebrate December 8th. Have a big party and laugh about how we were (and maybe sometimes we still are). Because today is the exact twenty years of one of the worst figures ever made by a government struggling with English translations. Something from a movie by Totò, but what can I say, by the Vanzina brothers. And in short, there was “the Berlusconi government of the“ 3i ”(English, business, internet).
And someone rightly decided that the site of Palazzo Chigi should be in English. (Right! Bravo! Thanks!). And someone else must have suggested using an automatic translator, like Google Translate (which, however, will only arrive five years later: so who knows what it was). The result was told by him on Repubblica Sebastiano Messina in this breaking latest news which came out precisely on 8 December. “Berlusconi put English on the internet. No sooner said than done. Unfortunately it is a tragedy. The Berlusconian English on the government website is a comic, macaronic mess, from the festival of the sfondone. And not in a secondary page, in the official biographies of the ministers. We mention at random by scrolling through the pages of the Palazzo Chigi site.
Minister Buttiglione’s teacher, Professor Augusto del Noce, became “August of the Walnut” thanks to the unprecedented translation of the surname. The Minister of Innovation Lucio Stanca is the director of the Milanese company “Mouthfuls”, a name that hides the all too literal translation of the gastronomic noun “bocconi”. Not only that, but the aforementioned minister “has covered loads with president of IBM”, that is, he has covered loads not of offices but of loads (with a tarp?) Together with the president of IBM. And in the end he worked “near the center of IBM Italy”, that is, not really in there but “near”, nearby (in the car park?) … Then you will see that Minister Marzano is the author of about 150 “banns”, word from religious lexicon aoperable only for banns of marriage. That he is an “ordinary professor”, an expression that abroad envies a cheap, poor, second-rate, ordinary teacher. And that by his will he was not part of the “government Dynes”, which would be the Anglo-American version of the Dini government.
Worse went to Mrs. Moratti… instead of her surname they translated the name making it “lady Joy Brichetto”, while her business plan became “slowly of reorganization” … “. Messina must have had a lot of fun because he also mentions Claudio Scajola, who became “Claudius Scajola” from whom Berlusconi asked for a hand, translated as “churches”, he asked them precisely; to reorganize Forza Italia, or Italy Force. And that’s not all: the Youth Front where Gasparri was a young man becomes the forehead of youth; Altero Matteoli, minister of the environment, becomes “minister of the Atmosphere”; and the Northern League of Boss becomes “alloy”, a metal alloy (Bossi da Varese, province of VA, translated “goes”). The only card without errors, Messina notes, was that of Silvio Berlusconi. To whom Messina advised the fourth “i”: “Identify the idiot who has combined that mess”.
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