Hillary Clinton’s gaffe: pushes wrong button with Russians
When trying to improve ties with a former Cold War-era foe, check a dictionary. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton learned that lesson the hard way on Friday, when she presented Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov with a gift bearing an incorrect translation - one that implied hostility, rather than peacemaking.
It seems that someone in the U.S. State Department forgot to double check the translation. Anyone with a sense of the Russian language, and there are quite a few in the State Department, could have told Clinton that there is a mistake in translation.
Clinton handed Lavrov a palm-sized box with a gift-wrapped red button on a black base, which said "Reset" in English and "Peregruzka" in Russian (with Latin script instead of Cyrillic, which could count as another gaffe). The problem was "peregruzka" doesn't mean reset. It means overcharged or overloaded.
Lavrov opened it and pulled out the gift. Clinton said she was presenting the gift because it "represents what President Obama and Vice President Biden and I have been saying and that is, 'We want to reset our relationship.' And so we will do it together."
"We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?" Clinton asked Lavrov.
"You got it wrong," Lavrov said. "This says 'peregruzka,' which means overcharged."
After the two top diplomats stopped laughing, Clinton said: "We won't let you do that to us, I promise."
Clinton adviser Philippe Reines said "Opechatka [Russian for typo] is being fixed, the gift will correctly read 'Perezagruzka'."
Russian media have been making fun at the US Secretary of State over this translation error.
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