Closed captioning service puts new spin on Trudeau
ABC translation mix-up made PM’s French remarks incomprehensible in English
Something was definitely lost in translation when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau visited the White House last week.
A problem with the closed captioning service used by ABC News made it appear as though Canada’s cool-in-two-languages leader had lost his mind, talking about “Nazi innings,” fishing boats and a “soda fortune in Quebec.”
The bulk of the incomprehensible captions were broadcast when Trudeau was speaking in French from the Rose Garden of the White House as U.S. President Barack Obama listened nearby.
So while the captions suggested to viewers that Trudeau and Obama had “announced its Nazi innings,” the prime minister in fact announced a plan to reduce emissions of methane and greenhouse gases and to build a sustainable economy in the Arctic.
Part of that northern co-operation involves new standards on “fishing in the high seas of the Arctic” and will “set new standards to ensure maritime transport with less emissions,” Trudeau said.
But you wouldn’t know that if you had been reading along with the captions, which recorded Canada’s prime minister like this: “He estimates. Quote. From fishing. Boat as it expanded to include maritime transport with and that’s with the.”
Sounds like the ramblings of someone from another planet, rather than a country just a short flight to the north of the American capital. Perhaps from the faraway land of “Motorola?” The captions would lead one to such a conclusion, as Trudeau expounded on what they had decided to do at the “railroad stations
“Boat as it expanded to include maritime transport with and that’s with the.” TRANSLATION BY ABC NEWS OF JUSTIN TRUDEAU’S FRENCH
in Motorola.”
In fact, what he was talking about was an agreement to try to ease border traffic by putting pre-clearance procedures in place at Toronto’s Billy Bishop Airport and in Quebec City, as well as at “railroad stations in Montreal” and in Vancouver.
The source of the problem is no Republican plot to alienate Obama’s friends and allies in the final months of his presidency. Rather, an ABC News spokesperson said that, like most every closed-captioning system used by television networks, the speech that appears at the bottom of its television screens is automatically generated by speech-recognition software.
In this case, “the software misinterpreted French for English,” the spokesperson said in an email.