poniedziałek, 9 lutego 2009

Dog bites man

To write about a lie in Gazeta Wyborcza, the leading newspaper in Poland, amounts to saying "dog bites man". Is that news at all? Here is one of their recent tricks.

At the security conference in Munich, Germany, the American vicepresident Joe Biden used the phrase "to press the reset button" when referring to a need for a new beginning in the Washington relations with Moscow. Here is an excerpt from an article on the Muenchner Sicherheitskonferenz site:

Biden urged Russia to relaunch their relations with NATO. It was time to work together in many areas and whenever possible. The same applied to future missile technology where the U.S. were planning to cooperate with Moscow. There would be coordination on the issue of a missile defense shield to be sited in Poland and the Czech Republic, Biden assured. In Biden’s opinion it was not recommendable, however, to gate out the discrepancies between America and Russia. Washington, for instance, was not willing to recognize the independence of South Ossetia, which had been forcibly separated from Georgia. The U.S. generally refused to recognize the Russian sphere of influence Moscow claims to have along its borders, Biden said.
And this is what Gazeta Wyborcza wrote in its Internet site gazeta.pl:
Biden zasygnalizował również nowe otwarcie w stosunkach z Moskwą. - Relacje z Rosją dryfowały w minionych latach w niebezpiecznym kierunku. Czas nacisnąć przycisk "skasuj" i ponownie przyjrzeć się dziedzinom, w których możemy współpracować - oświadczył.
The key word here is skasuj which means delete in Polish:

Czas nacisnąć przycisk "skasuj" means It is time to press the delete button.

However Joe Biden said reset. Resetting is not deleting. Biden did not "delete" anything about South Ossetia or the planned missile defense shield.

In the Wyborcza's version change of a single word alters the entire meaning of the Biden's speech.