Foreign managers’ wise words are lost in translation
The language barrier continues to provide plenty of comedic moments at press conferences, writes Jim White
Mazzarri’s translator took it upon himself to behave like the club’s PR man
Anyone visiting the Edinburgh Fringe this week is unlikely to witness comedy like we saw at Elland Road on Sunday. It came when Leeds United’s new manager, Marcelo Bielsa, was interviewed after his team’s fine victory over Stoke City.
Since Bielsa’s English is not much more assured than his grasp of French was when he was in charge of Marseille, the Argentine wisely came accompanied by a translator.
A question would be put to him by the interviewer in English. Then his interpreter, moving close enough to be considered a tad intimate, would whisper a Spanish translation quietly into his ear. Bielsa would offer up his reply in Spanish, to which his man would suggest an English approximation, which Bielsa would dutifully deliver. Or at least that was the theory.
The process quickly turned into a game of Chinese whispers. For instance, to the question: “Were you pleased with the margin of victory?” the interpreter, his whispered aside picked up by the microphone, suggested the reply should be: “We could have won with a smaller result,” which Bielsa, perhaps not entirely following, offered up: “The result, we could, er, small?” And that was about as lucid as it got.
Still, at least the 63-year-old was trying to engage in the local lingo. During the season that former Watford manager Walter Mazzarri was at Vicarage Road, he never attempted to speak English. The trouble was, while he was happy to conduct his media duties, his translator seemed increasingly bored by the process and began to behave like a club PR man, ensuring all rough edges were blanded out.
Thus, when Mazzarri was asked a reasonably in-depth question, he would answer, politely, at some length. But no matter how effusive he was, the translated reply would be routinely monosyllabic. “We did well,” was about the extent of it.
Eventually even Mazzarri seemed perturbed by his man’s performance. So much so that, towards the end of his tenure, he would watch the translator with an increasingly bemused look on his face, as if to say: “I’m pretty sure I said more than that.”
Though when Jose Mourinho acted as Sir Bobby Robson’s translator at Barcelona, the suspicion was he did rather the opposite. When the genial Robson issued his pre-match speech suggesting that everyone go out there and enjoy themselves, apparently the ambitious wannabe coach would add his own tactical nuance, translating his boss’s words as: “Right, we’ll play a back three, with the full-backs falling back into a five in transition.”
At this summer’s World Cup, one interpreter I heard might have borrowed from the Mourinho playbook. After Spain beat Iran, in bruising circumstances, Diego Costa was named man of the match and obliged to attend a press conference, something he regarded as akin to a visit to the dentist.
Here an Iranian journalist contravened sycophantic convention by asking the Spanish Brazilian in English why he felt it necessary to be such a nasty, provocative, fouling presence. As Costa listened to the translation – which clearly spared none of the details – his expression changed, steam began to issue from his ears, before he erupted in fury, tearing his earpiece out and issuing a highvolume tirade about how the man clearly had not a clue what he was talking about.
It was a magnificent display of ill-controlled fury. On that occasion, unlike with Bielsa, nothing was lost in translation.