Sarcasm and Mistranslation: The Two Last Bastions of Disinformation
- Read this article in:
- en
- ru
When the Kremlin has a bad case and is cornered by international criticism, the media it controls will first try to confuse audiences with smokescreens of disinformation. But when that trick doesn’t work anymore, a last bastion of the self-defence is to use sarcasm in order to simply ridicule the sources of the criticism. In addition, mistranslation of the criticism can be used to build an argument when no reasonable argument exists.
Both of these methods were put into play after Russia was officially called on to accept its responsibility for the downing of Flight MH17 over Eastern Ukraine, following conclusions from the Joint Investigative Team (JIT) that the missile that shot down the passenger plane was Russian.
An illustrative example was a commentary published by Izvestiya, a pro-Kremlin daily. The author, who is presented as a military expert, uses sarcastic quotation marks around the word “investigators” when he talks about the JIT officials, in order to denigrate them and their work.
At the same time, the expert (we will not follow his example and call him an “expert” in sarcastic quotation marks) ridicules the investigation for talking about the Russian BUK missile carrying a number of “fingerprints” that distinguish it from other BUK missiles, saying that “apparently, the fingerprints of suspects have been found on the pieces of the BUK missile…”
While the author can perhaps be excused for not understanding English, he clearly leans on a story that was published by the state news agency RIA, in which a lawmaker from the Russian State Duma referred to the same mistranslation of the English word “fingerprint”. RIA later retracted its story, as described by Polygraph.info; but Izvestiya’s piece remains on the daily’s website.
The Izvestiya article and its uncritical misunderstanding of “fingerprint” was spotted by blogger and editor of Coda Story’s Russian version, Alexey Kovalev.
Further reading:
MH17:
MH17: Time is Running Out for Disinformation
Defensive disinformation as decoy flare: Skripal and Flight MH17
Flight MH17: Why can the Kremlin not tell the truth?
Mistranslations:
NTV goes to Denmark: a story about backfire
“Vous êtes malhonnête, Monsieur!”
