Covering for the Mothership

One criticism of Spiegel Online over at Davids Medienkritik that seems to have legs is the one I like best, that the English site is somehow “cover” for anti-Americanism by the Germans. This argument could only be cooked up by people who make a full-time job out of snuffling up anti-Americanism. (Or is Ray D. writing a doctoral dissertation?) Anyway, in an earlier post I mentioned a man at a Fulbright dinner who passed off a version of this opinion as informed comment. He wasn’t a Fulbright scholar; he was a middle-aged businessman from San Francisco who’d done a bit of American diplomacy. When I mentioned Spiegel Online, he said he’d been talking to a few folks, and some of them agreed that Spiegel Online’s English translations gave a more America-friendly image of the magazine than the German versions of the same articles. It was polite dinner conversation, so he went no further, but the implication was that the English pages were somehow a mask. I said, “I bet a few of those people read Davids Medienkritik.”

He said, “That’s right, I think they do.”

And what might they have learned? “Unfortunately for SPIEGEL ONLINE,” ranted Davids Medienkritik last November, “quite a few people are noticing the Jekyll-and-Hyde-like inconsistency and have come to the conclusion that the ‘English Site’ is little more than a prop created to improve the publication’s deservedly negative image in the English-speaking world.”

Where, I wonder, does that image come from? Not … Davids Medienkritik?

OK, some other voices have bashed Spiegel (though Henry Kissinger likes the magazine). And it’s true that the English site isn’t as anti-American as the German one. It’s run by different people. In fact, it’s a separate operation, just as Spiegel Online in German is separate from the magazine. That’s Important Point Number One, because from reading Medienkritik you get the impression that “Spiegel” is a monolithic bloc of activist Socialists run by a powerful anti-Bush cabal.

In fact, each office has its own staff, makes its own editorial decisions, and hears back from a different set of readers. Each assigns and writes its own material. Since it all belongs to “Spiegel,” the stories slop back and forth. The German and English pages do their own daily news and write their own features; then they swap a number of those features and reprint (and sometimes adapt) a few pieces each week from the magazine.

Spiegel Online in English, in other words, isn’t just a translation service. It was set up as an independent newsroom that can treat German pieces as raw material. Translating articles word-for-word would be a disaster: German and Anglo-American journalism traditions are too different. (Germans don’t write true leads, for example.) Any adaptations or additions have to be backed up by their own sources — the English office does try not to make things up — but no one has orders from on high to change this, correct that, or even print this or that feature. It’s a hands-off, Western-liberal way of arranging a media conglomerate.

It has the effect of toning down German anti-Americanism on the English site—sometimes—but it would be pure fanaticism to argue that toning down German prejudice was the point of the project. Most editors in the English office are American or English and simply grit their teeth at certain German habits. Which means Ray D. makes a fool of himself by focusing paranoiacally on, say, a photo caption that turns up in English with a shameless bit of anti-Americanism removed. Most photo captions get rewritten entirely. What the Spiegel translator in this case probably did was look at the German, think, “That’s crap,” and write a better line in English. The Medienkritik reaction?

Another Crooked Translation from SPIEGEL ONLINE

Same caption, different text: Even SPIEGEL ONLINE’s photo captions exhibit the sort of crooked translation that we have come to expect from them. The German on the left states: “Worked crooked for the firm: After 35 years at Pinnotex, Marshall Pinnix was one of 5000 let go.” Why doesn’t the English version contain the grim reference to being “worked crooked”? Why is that omitted? Is the translator trying to soften the blow for English-speaking readers? Why don’t they just write what they mean?

It’s not a vast conspiracy. The English-language editors have enormous freedom, and no one’s trying to hide stuff from Americans, Germans, German-Americans, Davids Medienkritik, or anyone. Remember that Spiegel Online readers aren’t just American, so there’s no reason to avoid offense to Washington. Most of English-language readers are in Europe. They also come from India, South Africa, Hong Kong, Australia, as well as the US.

The big idea is really not to cloak the depth of German loathing for George Bush. The idea is to compete in the online world-news game, which means a) that most of the site’s readers, like most of the world, skew to the left of Davids Medienkritik, and b) that the Anglo-American editors work within their own culture. Both points are fair enough for Ray D. to make. But anyone who wants to compare the whole online project to (let’s say) Yasser Arafat’s political methods will either have to calm the fuck down or risk getting laughed off the Internet:

SPIEGEL ONLINE’s English Site Plays the Selective Translation Game with Headlines

Yasser Arafat was a well-known practicioner of duplicity during his long career. He would tell his Palestinian audience one thing, while delivering a completely different message to the West in English. It seems that SPIEGEL ONLINE is engaged in a similar shell game. The “SPIEGEL Online English Site” just published a translation of the Mascolo-Zand article. But the headline was distinctly different in tone. Instead of reading, “Iraq: The Start of the Civil War”, it reads “Crumbling Iraq: Is the Country Heading for Civil War?”

I think it’s a plain statement of fact that the line about Yasser Arafat is nothing but ugly populist red meat for the American right-wing blogosphere.

This one’s also good:

But we still have to ask: If Iraq is such a “fiasco” to the German site, why isn’t it a “fiasco” to the English site? Were the editors worried about a negative reaction from Rumsfeld? Were they afraid to express their true feelings in English?

Well, no. Technically, the German editors don’t express themselves in English—they don’t do the translating, and they don’t vet translations. (At least not translations of unsigned pieces.)

In conclusion, writes Ray:

The end result is obvious: A two-faced, inconsistent approach to the very same interview. The “English Site” staff has once again sacrificed what little journalistic integrity and honesty it has left to cover for the mother site and promote a false image.

More on interviews later, but what would seriously be the point of creating an America-friendly translation service for an America-bashing German rag? The day is too short for “covering the mother site,” and putting it that way only stuffs a much larger project into the tempestuous teapot of Ray D’s sore little head.

     posted 11 October 2006 by Michael Scott Moore

  1. Well, I like Der Spiegel in English or in German and this “selective translation” of headlines theory is ridiculous. Why in the world would a German news magazine feel the need to appease the English-speaking world in its English section? But I suppose there is no reasoning with people who see conspiracies all around them.

    People have different viewpoints, and headlines are written by people. For German class, I once gave a presentation comparing headlines of the same story from different German news sources and sometimes it was REALLY difficult to realize from the headline that these stories were describing the same event. And this would similarly be true with any other country in the world (unless all media is controlled by the state, I suppose).

    Just because a news outlet has a different viewpoint from the reader, does not mean it’s a conspiracy and does not mean they’ve “sacrificed journalistic integrity”. Except maybe in the case of Fox News ;-)

    — Christina    Oct 11, 01:00 pm    #

  2. gee, how disappointing! it warms my heart to think of a cabal of conspiring anti-americans deviously engaging in a bait and switch game with the poor unwashed internet masses! i suppose the old saw is true – if you want something done right you just have to do it yourself!

    — wi11iam13    Oct 13, 08:42 pm    #