So the current occupant of the White House recently tweeted:
“The FAKE & FRAUDULENT NEWS MEDIA is working hard to convince Republicans and others I should not use social media […]”
And this article in the Berliner Zeitung translated it as:
“Die betrügerische Lügenpresse arbeitet hart daran, Republikaner zu überzeugen, dass ich die sozialen Netzwerke nicht mehr nutzen soll” – Quelle: http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/27899762 ©2017
That incendiary term, “Lügenpresse,” caught my eye because it’s not the only possible translation. I asked a translator in Austria to put this tweet into German without consulting any existing German versions, and she came up with:
“Die falschen und betrügerischen Nachrichtenmedien arbeiten hartnäckig daran, RepublikanerInnen und andere davon zu überzeugen, dass ich von sozialen Medien meine Finger lassen sollte […]”
So what does “Lügenpresse” mean and why did the Berliner Zeitung’s translator select it?
Many English speakers are familiar with it as a favorite buzzword of the National Socialists. The “lying press” is a common translation, but literally it’s the “lie-press;” in this compound noun form you get a strong impression of publications that consist entirely of falsehoods. All lies, all the time. It’s a highly dismissive, rather than merely critical, term. American neo-Nazis use it, one of them in a speech in Washington that was much viewed on YouTube earlier this year. The German far right also continues to use it. In recent years it’s gained enough popularity to be voted “Unwort des Jahres” (“Non-word of the year”) in 2015. The committee opined:
Bei “Lügenpresse” handelt es sich um einen nationalsozialistisch vorbelasteten Begriff, der im Zuge der Pegida-Bewegung gezielt Verwendung findet, dabei jedoch nicht vollständig reflektiert wird. Die Jury drückt mit der Wahl ihre Kritik an der Sprache dieser Bewegung aus.
(“Lügenpresse” is a term with National-Socialist baggage which is being employed as part of the Pegida movement with a deliberate aim, but without adequate reflection. The jury used this choice to express its criticism of the movement’s language.)
According to several sources (but primarily this article by Matthias Heine), the term actually dates back to the nineteenth century; its earliest appearance in print may be in 1835 in the Wiener Zeitung to describe the Paris press. For a long time it was used by conservative Catholics to dismiss liberal journalism. Even before the Nazis, it had anti-Semitic implications, at least when used by conservatives – but it was also employed on the left from time to time, e.g. at Communist rallies in the early twentieth century and later in the DDR press.
So it doesn’t belong exclusively to the extreme right, although these days most people – certainly in the English-speaking world but to a large extent also in Germany – perceive it that way, which gets us to the question of why the Berliner Zeitung chose to render Trump’s tweet as it did. The easy answer is “They want to make him sound like a Nazi (…because he is one” or …because they hate him,” depending on your point of view) but the choice is probably based on serious considerations. As Heine states in his article, “Lügenpresse was, then as now, not so much a right-wing word as an anti-democratic one in general. Since 1835, people who say Lügenpresse have been mostly those who had no intention of distinguishing between a lying press and an honest one. Instead, they mainly wished to insinuate that lies were simply the essence of an uncontrolled press. The only non-Lügenpresse was in every case the one the Lügenpresse-haters controlled themselves.” This description applies pretty well to Trump and his henchmen, so I think it was a reasonable choice.
Heine’s article mentions another English speaker who got the “Lügenpresse treatment” when his statements appeared in German, and that is the Northern Irish unionist Ian Paisley. In this case it was a translation of “the lying press,” which makes it an even more obvious translation choice than with Trump’s “FAKE AND FRAUDULENT NEWS MEDIA,” but Heine still considers it significant enough to be discussed in some detail.
One last thing to consider: if a German term is used in English, and an English speaker does not use it, should it be used to translate that person’s statements into German or not? After thinking this over a bit, I’ve decided it’s mostly irrelevant. An English speaker could say, “Our Zeitgeist is anti-democratic” or “The spirit of our times is anti-democratic” but in either case “Zeitgeist” would the expected translation into German.
So in conclusion, I think the Berliner Zeitung team consciously made a significant decision here. I believe it was justifiable, though some might view it as defamatory. At any rate, it offers a glimpse of the kinds of issues translators have to consider when dealing with statements by political figures.