Politics lost in translations

Wouldn't it be nice to have a president who could speak another language?

OK, no fair saying it would be nice to have a president who could speak one.

We're thinking about the Democratic candidates now. Pete Buttigieg seems to be the name of the moment, and you can't help noticing his linguistic talent. The Buttigieg folk say that besides English, he's proficient in Spanish, French, Italian, Maltese, Norwegian, Arabic and Dari, a variation of Persian.

Let's go out on a limb and say he's got this résumé category sewn up.

Buttigieg picked up Arabic in college and Dari when he served in the military in Afghanistan. He reportedly learned Norwegian in order to read novels by Erlend Loe, most of which haven't been translated into English. This makes perfect sense to me. When I was in college I took Russian because I wanted to read "War and Peace" in the original. I actually never progressed beyond "We Go to Shop With Grandmother," but the impulse was absolutely identical.

Obviously, multilingualism isn't the most crucial thing you look at when you're picking a president. Abraham Lincoln spoke nothing but English, while Herbert Hoover spoke Mandarin and translated mining books from Latin.

POP QUIZ: Who was the only president for whom English was a second language? It was Martin Van Buren, who was raised speaking Dutch. We're not going to subtract any points for this one, since there should be a rule against quizzes to which the answer is "Martin Van Buren."

This is definitely turning into a sterling Democratic campaign when it comes to linguistic diversity. Beto O'Rourke speaks Spanish and Kamala Harris' staff says the senator, who went to high school in Quebec, speaks "conversational French." Kirsten Gillibrand understands French, Spanish and Mandarin.

John Hickenlooper picked up some Spanish in his school and travel. When he was governor of Colorado he gave a speech every year in Spanish, with friends to coach him "so I don't mangle the pronunciation." The working-on-Spanish category is pretty large. Julián Castro was raised in Texas by a Mexican-American mother who made it a point to speak only English to her sons. For years now, he's been saying that he's recapturing the family's other language. "I'm resolved that before I die I want to speak it fluently," he told Vogue in 2013.

Well, he's only 44. Recently, Castro told an NPR podcast that he now speaks Spanish "to some extent."

People almost always appreciate candidates who at least seem to be trying. Bill Clinton wowed the world when he threw in a few lines of German in a 1994 speech in Berlin. Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush both got points for their fumbling Spanish, and while Barack Obama doesn't actually speak any other languages, he has to get an A for effort. Obama has, over the years, delivered remarks in Spanish, Swahili, pretty good Indonesian, pretty bad French, German and Hindi, an endeavour for which the international Hindi Association praised his "good intentions".

But sometimes nothing really works out. Cory Booker once addressed a radio reporter in Spanish, only to discover that the man was Swiss. "I do not speak Swiss. I cannot even say 'Swiss cheese' in Swiss," the senator responded genially. Coldhearted observers noted that there is no such language as Swiss.

Bernie Sanders, whose staff didn't return a query about his linguistic skills, doesn't seem to have a whole lot. He has described himself as "the son of a Polish immigrant who came to this country speaking no English," but Sanders failed to rise to the occasion when he was asked to say something in his father's native tongue. ("Unless 'no' is a Polish word, I can't.")

It would have been nice, this week, to have had a president who could say a few words in French about the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. He would not necessarily have had to give an entire interview with a French-language television station like Buttigieg did. But a couple of prememorised, read-from-the-teleprompter sentences would have been appreciated.

Donald Trump, of course, didn't bother. You'd expect a man who talks about his father's emigration from Germany to be more open to linguistic diversity — although, of course, Fred Trump was actually born in the Bronx.

This is a man who ran TV commercials in which he attempted to speak Hindi in 2016 while attacking one of his primary opponents for speaking to reporters in Spanish. ("He should really set the example by speaking English while in the United States.")

If Trump runs for re-election against a Democrat with some language facility, chances are he'll simply say anything but English is un-American. "My bet is if Trump ran against Buttigieg, he'd try to use it against him," predicted presidential historian Michael Beschloss.

It's worked before. John Kerry and Mitt Romney both staggered under opponents' hints that being able to speak French made them big sissies.

Meanwhile, the language bar in the White House is set pretty low. Which is strange in a way, since the president's first wife spoke five languages and his current one is also multilingual. Maybe it's easier to be around him if you can always mentally switch into Slovenian.

And for our part, be honest — it's nice to know there's at least a translator sitting between Trump and the rest of the world's leaders.

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