Gossip bomb is a damp squib

Tuesday, February 9th, 2016

So, the pope is cool and “groovy” for telling priests and nuns not to “drop a gossip bomb” on their peers.

He told members of the clergy in an improvised speech: “If you get an urge to say something against a brother or a sister, to drop a gossip bomb, bite your tongue! Hard!”

We’ve had the F-bomb and photobombs; now the 79-year-old leader of the Catholic Church is leading new slang.

Except he isn’t. In Italian he talked about “una bomba di chiacchiera” (literally “a bomb of gossip”). An Italian speaker wouldn’t relate that to slang and the Italian word for photobombing, which is “photobombing” (it seems we invented ruining other people’s photos), but something more akin to the “terrorism of gossip”.

As for the F-bomb, when I lived in Spain I found out that single words are weak; if you really want to insult someone, the longer, and the more family members involved, the better.

The point here is that the “groovy” feel of the pope’s term comes entirely from the English the translator has used – not from the original speech.

All of the words and phrases we use are connected to other words; they have connotations, be they positive, negative, formal, informal, specialist, lay, dated or “groovy”.

And once a word is translated, not all of these links can be retained; a whole new set is created, sometimes determined by the receiving culture’s opinions and standards, and sometimes entirely arbitrary.

What works in one culture might not work in another, and if we focus on only one aspect and ignore the bigger picture, that is when things go wrong.

Translators always need to imagine an equivalent situation in their own culture, and then think what people would say.

Would the Pope coin the term “gossip bomb” if he were speaking in English? Probably not, although he’s not beyond using slang elsewhere, such as when he told an event he was “un tronco con la máquina” (a bonehead at computers). Continue reading