Kim Jong-un’s translator wanted to show his knowledge of the Russian language, but his accent and equipment let him down
The ears of users, spoiled by Internet memes, heard selective Russian obscenities in the words of the translator when Comrade Kim made a toast
Photo: TASS
“Kim Jong-un’s translator messed up something with the translation.” Telegram channels exploded with bewilderment during the broadcast official lunch, which is at the Vostochny Cosmodrome Vladimir Putin gave in honor of his guest – the leader of the DPRK.
The ears of users, spoiled by Internet memes, heard selective Russian obscenities in the words of the translator when Comrade Kim made a toast:
“The moment I entered Russian soil, I felt a fighting spirit and… [удручающую] reality,” the translator allegedly said.
“TVNZ” in collaboration with a fact-checking resource “Noodle Media” project about debunking fakes, I decided to check what the North Korean leader actually said.
It turned out that Comrade Kim did not mean anything bad. Quite the contrary. He stated that “from the first moment of arrival on Russian soil, I felt a fighting spirit and seething reality.” The full transcript of the Russian leader’s gala dinner in honor of his North Korean colleague has been posted on the official Kremlin website.
Moreover, in order to check the speech of translator Kim, a colleague from ANO “Dialogue Regions” turned to their special algorithms “Zephyr”*. And it turned out that the original track does not sound Russian obscenities at all, but the same “ebullient reality” that the official Kremlin website tells us about. And the distorted perception by the Russian ear is due to the slight accent of the speaker (the translator is Korean, and no matter how well he learns to speak the language without an accent, he still will not learn), as well as the “hint” from the caption to the video, where they are already “explaining” to us, what we should hear in the video.
Moreover, linguistic experts explained how even the most well-mannered Russians could hear rudeness from the lips of a translator, even at such a high level. The fact is that the phrase “ebullient reality” is not very Russian. In Russian speech, even the word “ebullient” itself is practically not used, especially in combination with “reality”. But in combination with a swear word, which many have heard – regularly, so that the Russian ear hears what is more familiar to it.
In general, the translator was let down by his sincere desire to show the depth of his knowledge of the Russian language, coupled with a slight accent and imperfect equipment.
*Zephyr algorithms are a special system of the Dialogue Regions ANO, which monitors both audio and video materials (including deepfakes) using transcription, then evaluates them using its own algorithms and, as a result, conducts analysis using Artificial Intelligence.
When sound is fed into the system, it is broken down into fragments, then converted into a log-Mel spectrogram, and then transmitted to the encoder. And this encoder decrypts the segment using several special special tokens, each of which performs different tasks: identifies the language, places timestamps at the phrase level, and makes a transcription of multilingual speech.
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