Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Tejada becomes eloquent

From the Washington Post:

"How is it possible that everything I've worked so hard for has been damaged because I used B-12?" said Tejada, drowning out the buzz from low-hung fluorescent lights. "I've been in a baseball for nine years now and my name is tarnished now because of this? Why? I know I am good role model. And up until now I've proven to be as such. The only time I've had a problem is now. And the only thing I did was to try to help a friend by giving him B-12, and to tell him how to use it. I didn't commit any crime."

This is what gets me curious about newspaper reporting. Did Tejada really say "And up until now I've proven to be as such"? Of course not. Did he say the equivalent in Spanish and the writer translated it? We don't know, but the writer's name is Jorge Arangure Jr. and he was there in the DR, so it's likely he knows Spanish and spoke to Tejada in Spanish.

But we'll never know because there are no rules about disclosing whether or not the interview was translated by the writer or not, which sucks because - for all we know this guy isn't very good at translating. Who knows what Tejada really said. Did he get the gist of it down? Sure, he probably did, but we didn't get the nuances and intricacies that tell us about Tejada's personality and rhetorical "voice" in this translation.

Or, even worse, we get a voice that is markedly different from his real one.

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