US State Department fights back over Russian Fake Letter

[jone]

Ivestia is taking American Bashing to a new low.  They created a letter from Randy Barry, US Special Envoy to the lesbian and gay community to the head of the LGBTI organization in Russia.  The letter thanks the organization for staging a rally against the Ukraine war.

But the US State Department is fighting back.  The State Department put up a copy of the letter on its Facebook page to lampoon the gramatical errors and poor wordsmithing done by an obvious non-native English speaker.

The fact that the Russian government continues to do nothing to defend foreign countries against these obvious internal lies tells a lot about how Russia continues to mislead its own population. 

Here is the article:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34869112

[ML]

Not to support anything that Russian low life's do, but . . .

Many of the 'corrections' are a little trivial or even silly, and one is wrong.

1) Moving the heading a bit to the right . . . really ??

2) Correcting LGBT to LGBTI.  The LGBT is almost universal.  There will undoubtedly be additional letters added over time, so it would be hard for anyone to keep up.

3) Changing 'a' to 'the.'  I think 'a' is probably more correct because there will be more than one.

4) Changing United States to U.S.    . . . really ???

5) Changing Consular to Counselor.   Here I think the change is just plain wrong.

I think our 'correctors' should be a little embarrassed.

[mendeleyev]

The mistakes are comical and do show that it is fake. Even Russian social media is laughing collectively at the clumsy attempt. Some sites are using this letter to demonstrate how mistakes are often made in applying grammatical "articles" to English.

Diplomatic style guides and protocols are similar to style guides used in media. That first sentence, absolutely and without question should have begun with "The" as just one example.

Only in certain instances do we use U.S., and in most cases we write either U.S.A. or The United States. For the most part, the only times we use US (and a period should be inserted after each letter: U.S. or U.S.A.) is when naming a department or an official. Examples: U.S. Secretary of State or the U.S. State Department.

In official State Department communications the closing would not have been at the center of the page, but formatted to the left just as the salutation is formatted.

Also, official correspondence must include the initials of the person who typed the letter, unless it was typed by the signer himself--these types of correspondence are not composed and sent by one person. Unless your name is Hillary and you have an illegal private server, there is a series of checks that must be passed before such a letter would ever see the light of day. As it is, that letter would never had seen daylight.

Finally, no diplomat (at least still employed) would be so stupid as to tell one group that their efforts had led to increased funding at the expense of other groups. Nor would you (unless your last name is Clinton) stay out of jail when using a private (gmail) account for official diplomatic correspondence.

The silliness of this reminds me of earlier days when I'd pop into the presidential press service to suggest obvious mistakes to the Kremlin's English language press releases. Without fail, they'd protest that the persons in charge of such releases were fluent English speakers who had graduated from the finest Russian universities. It was I who didn't understand good English (and I was told that in such instances), not their crack translators who had never lived or breathed a day in an English speaking nation. After awhile, one learns to stop throwing pearls before swine. However, I wasn't the only one pointing out the mistakes, and over time they've gotten better at hiring Russian speakers who have done more than simply attend University English classes.

This letter was likely generated at one of their troll factories, perhaps in St Petersburg.

[2tallbill]

(unless your last name is Clinton) stay out of jail when using a private (gmail) account for official diplomatic correspondence.

Hillary doesn't know how to type.

[SANDRO43]

Only in certain instances do we use U.S., and in most cases we write either U.S.A. or The United States. For the most part, the only times we use US (and a period should be inserted after each letter: U.S. or U.S.A.) is when naming a department or an official. Examples: U.S. Secretary of State or the U.S. State Department.

The grammatical rule of interposing periods into an acronym was slowly and silently abandoned since the 1970s: in 1969 I had joined an I.B.M. Italia, shortly afterwards morphing into IBM Italia .

A strange rule applied to Government entities here, e.g. Ferrovie dello Stato would be shortened into FF.SS., the Carabinieri into CC, etc. 

One must be careful when creating new acronyms: in 1937 the Fascist regime elevated to "Ministero della Cultura Popolare" a previous Secretariat for Press and Propaganda, whose basic function was censorship. Its official and unfortunate abbreviation was MinCulPop, sounding too close to "M'incul Pop", i.e. "I bugger the population", an interpretation promptly seized upon by most of the affected people .

[Anotherkiwi]

The silliness of this reminds me of earlier days when I'd pop into the presidential press service to suggest obvious mistakes to the Kremlin's English language press releases. Without fail, they'd protest that the persons in charge of such releases were fluent English speakers who had graduated from the finest Russian universities. It was I who didn't understand good English (and I was told that in such instances), not their crack translators who had never lived or breathed a day in an English speaking nation. After awhile, one learns to stop throwing pearls before swine. However, I wasn't the only one pointing out the mistakes, and over time they've gotten better at hiring Russian speakers who have done more than simply attend University English classes.

Not just press releases.  Just look at some travel and hotel sites, for example (not just Russian - it applies to every country where English is not the first language).  Some of the content is too bad for the meaning to be more than guessed at - it certainly isn't the way that English would be written.

Just one example during my own travels to the FSU - I spent a couple of days in a really nice hotel in a city that I won't name (although some people may be able to figure it out, since I haven't thrown out much praise where hotels are concerned).  The English version of their website, although adequate, could do with a bit of TLC in the grammar department.  I mentioned this to one of the receptionists while I was staying there, and she immediately pulled out English-language copies of the room service and breakfast menus and asked me to show her what I meant.

When I did, she asked me to write these out properly, adding that other people had commented on them and that she herself thought they could be improved (her own English was probably worth at least 9/10).  She promised to pass these comments on to the hotel's owner, but I never heard anything more, so I guess that the owner was yet another who thought that his own English was better than that of a native speaker.