3. During a visit to Poland in 1977, a poor translation resulted in Jimmy Carter expressing a desire to defect to the Communist nation and have intimate relations with its people
In 1977, during his first official visit abroad as President of the United States, Jimmy Carter was betrayed by the language barrier and the incompetence of his translator, Steven Seymour. In the course of meeting his Polish counterpart, Edward Gierek, Seymour was on hand to provide a translation of his president’s words into Polish. Unfortunately, his translations could, perhaps, have not been farther from the truth of what Carter said.
Announcing that he was extremely glad to be in Poland for his first trip abroad, Seymour somehow managed to mistranslate the friendly statement into the announcement of seeming defection by the American President, turning “I left the United States this morning” into “I left the United States, never to return”. Furthermore, Carter’s warm statement of his visit to the nation was bizarrely mistranslated into the comment that President Carter “as happy to grasp at Poland’s private parts”. Following up this colossal mistake, Seymour then successively translated Carter’s expression of a hope to learn more about the Polish peoples “desires for the future” into “I desire the Poles carnally”. Adding insult to injury, during Carter’s toast at a state banquet later during the same trip a different interpreter providing a translation could not understand the American President’s Georgia accent and consequently chose to simply not translate his words rather than offer an inaccurate depiction. Perhaps, in hindsight, the latter interpreter opted for the better path in the face of confusion.