Disability news - in Russian!
- 31 Aug 05, 12:00 AM
Today on the site, we've been doing our bit for foreign relations by publishing one of our ever-popular Ouch Top Tens - this one lists ten words meaning 'disability' in other languages. So it seems somehow wrong to be posting an entry all about foreign news stories being badly translated into terrible English. However, my argument is that it's funny!!!
The latest target of our amusement is the Russian news service . One of their current top stories is the incredibly inspiring :
"32-year-old Sergey Burlakov from Taganrog, Russia, is the first man with no arms and no legs who navigated the aircraft . . . However, the word disabled seems inappropriate referred to this man. After losing legs and hands in the car accident Sergey managed to get back to the life at the fullest . . . When about in the middle of the distance he had to change bandages soaked in blood, a woman that was watching the event fainted."
And so it goes on. And on and on. If you want to read more, check out a previous Pravda report on Sergey Burlakov under the equally fantastic headline: .
Further back in Pravda's extensive disability archives, you can find this even more unintentionally humorous story: :
"A woman from a Russian provincial town delivered a disabled baby-boy because of doctors' mistake. Specialists advised the child should be sent to a special school for hopeless children. The woman declined the offer and made her son a sports champion."
A school for hopeless children?! At least we just call them 'special' schools.
Of course, these stories have probably - well, hopefully - been translated by computer, rather than by a human. And it is wrong to laugh at bad English from abroad, really it is. So a big friendly British hello - and a heartfelt apology - to any Russian Ouch readers out there. *cough*
Comments
I love the sentence "The woman declined the offer ....". Wish I'd thought of doing that!