It’s hard to know who was more mortified over the fiasco, but one person lost their job over it, the other just had to live down the embarrassment.

When the late President Jimmy Carter visited Poland in 1977, he said in his speech that he was interested in learning about the Polish people’s desires for the future. Only that isn’t what his translator, Steven Seymour, actually said. Seymour translated Carter’s statement to suggest that Carter “desired the Poles carnally.” As in the biblical sense.

It only got worse from there. When President Carter said he was “happy to be in Poland,” Seymour mistranslated the sentence into Carter being happy to grasp at Poland’s private parts

Other botched translations in the speech lead to Seymour’s firing the next day, and Carter was left with the embarrassment overshadowing the diplomatic point of his visit. It is possible that until Sofia Coppola’s film, “Lost in Translation,” was released in 2003, some people still remembered Carter’s disastrous visit to Poland whenever they heard the phrase.  

People who speak more than one language know that there are some words and phrases that don’t translate well between languages. In the dog world, it’s not surprising that similar translation issues occur; what’s more remarkable is that they don’t happen more frequently. The AKC recognizes 200 breeds as of this writing, and the majority of them originated in non-English speaking countries. The responsibility for translating the breed standard into English typically falls to a breed’s parent club in the United States, though the AKC oversees the process and must approve the final English version of the breed standard.

Presumably, kennel clubs in other countries have a similar process, and most of us will probably never know if errors are made in their process, but we do know of one mistake made, and it was a big one.  In the 1950s, an inaccuracy in the translation of the Weimaraner standard into Slovakian led to the Slovakian Rough-Haired Pointer being initially registered as a Rough Haired Weimaraner, an error not identified until 1975 when the German Weimaraner Club discovered the mistake. Once the mistake was recognized, the breed was removed from the Weimaraner classification, but the mistranslation had an impact.  It delayed the recognition of the SRHP as a distinct breed, and until 1975, breedings between rough and smooth coated SRHPs were carried out based on the mistaken classification.

We can do no better than to direct you to Craig Kosak to learn more about the early origins of the breed, but more salient to this post is that SRHP enthusiasts in Slovakia persuaded the FCI to recognize the breed by the name it’s known by today, something that happened in 1982. By the end of 1984, there were 550 dogs registered in the studbook, and of those, 260 had passed tests (30 with forest and special work tests, and 26 with full utility tests). This breed could work!

We conclude with mention of another “boo boo” that happened in 1963 when the Aidi’s standard labeled the breed as the Atlas Sheepdog. The Atlas Mountains of North Africa are the origins of the breed, but its classification as a “sheepdog” was fundamentally incorrect; the Aidi never actually worked as a sheepdog in the traditional sense, but was, as Aidi enthusiasts had said all along, a livestock guardian mountain dog used to protect its flock, and had been for over 5,000 years.  The mistake was corrected in 1969.

As for our post title, the Norwegian word for “speed” is “fart.” Clearly a word that could get lost in translation!

Image of Slovakian Rough-Haired Pointer puppy by Adam Jan Figel/Shutterstock