Newsday on Russians' love for nukes: lost in translation?

I am a news junkie.  It's the first thing I open when i wake up (against doctor's orders), and often the last thing I read before bed.  Admittedly, given the nature of news these days, it's often a terrible idea.  I also do multiple followup check-ins during the day.  I binge on headlines using the Google News app on my phone which super helpfully auto-aggregates news from various sources.  I also frequent a handful of news sites like CNN and BBC, and then deep-dive into the longer-form articles from the WashPost, NYT, Atlantic, and Guardian.

Sloppy journalism is a thing

My biggest pet peeve in journalism, aside from outright lies, are the articles that appear sloppy.  There are several kinds of sloppy.  One I see all the time is an announcement of some new sensational research finding, e.g. eating more oranges is linked to higher homicide rates.  Wait, what?  What's the connection?  Is it a correlation or a causation, something media regularly gets wrong?  How does it compare to other potential factors?  Should I be concerned?  These seemingly obvious questions rarely get addressed.  If there is no solid answer, I get it - but then please state so clearly in the article: "here's the best hypothesis on why these are linked...", or simply admit "we have no clue about the nature of this relationship."

Another kind of sloppy is when an article doesn't flow or make sense, as if it's been spliced together from seemingly related but poorly connected segments.  That was exactly my experience with a recent piece in Newsweek.  Newsweek is an interesting animal. A while back it was a respected publication, until a few years ago it ended up in hot water because of biased coverage and questionable quality content.  It's been trying to rebuild its image ever since. It hasn't been on my radar until recently, when I started noticing its increasingly frequent and reasonably accurate coverage of international news.

A Newsweek article that caught my eye

Among other things, I've been religiously following the news about Ukraine, where I was born and grew up.  The senseless deaths, destruction, and suffering are heartbreaking enough. On top of it, however, there are renewed fears of a nuclear escalation, which is beyond frightening. Any story that talks about it quickly triggers anxiety and nausea. The Newsweek article I stumbled upon was no exception, with an ominous title "Igor Girkin Says Russia Should Use Tactical Nuclear Weapons on NATO Members". Hold on, I thought, time out. Is one of Russia's most influential military bloggers, who is closely connected with the Kremlin, suggesting that they should fire up the nukes?

Based on a recent Russian TV interview, at first the article looked legit. But when I started digging in, I struggled to understand what was actually said during the interview - because the story felt so choppy and confusing. I wondered whether translation might have been an issue.  Being a native Russian speaker, I turned to the source, the original interview... and sure enough, quickly identified several translation slash interpretation errors, compounded by the flawed structure of the article. 

Russian invasion and the threat of nukes

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is one of Europe's biggest and most devastating armed conflicts in recent history.  Having suddenly upended the sense of safety and security in the region, it has a real risk of spilling over into a much broader international conflict.  Unscrupulous and desperate, the Kremlin regime has not ruled out using nuclear weapons, which most immediately scares the living sh*t out of the residents of this highly dense region, with one of the world's highest concentrations of sovereign countries.  Needless to say, the possibility of a nuclear escalation is universally alarming.  Thanks to the wonders of online tech and social media, news today spreads almost instantly, and gets amplified many fold along the way.  Given such tinderbox of a situation, journalists must take extreme care to ensure accuracy and avoid triggering a real-life firestorm.

I personally have no love for pro-Kremlin bloggers, including Igor Girkin, the subject of the article.  Girkin is a Russian Army intelligence colonel turned military pundit, sentenced in absentia by a Dutch court for his direct role in the death of everyone on board of the Malaysia Airlines flight downed over Ukraine in 2014.  This is a bona fide monster and a criminal, who is also directly and indirectly responsible for thousands of dead and injured Ukrainians.  But did he really suggest that Russia should preemptively use nuclear weapons in the conflict in Ukraine?  Not so fast.

Less suck

The article quotes Girkin as saying "I believe that we should use tactical nuclear weapons." That's incredibly alarming, and it should be - especially if you believe that's he is echoing the official Kremlin sentiment. If you listen to his interview, however, he most certainly does not say that. To be fair, he is not the most articulate speaker, doesn't complete his sentences, and jumps around... which can betray a robo-translator incapable of detecting and understanding nuances of human conversations. But this is precisely why, when the temperatures are elevated and people are twitchy, the translation should be checked by a human.

So, in the interview, when asked, Girkin is responding to the interviewer's question whether Russia should unilaterally use nuclear weapons in Ukraine - but he is not advocating that it should do so. Not only he believes it's undesirable, but flat out states that using nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be a terrible idea. The only time he suggests the use might be appropriate is by targeting NATO countries, and only in response to a direct NATO aggression against Russia. To be clear, his is an equally monstrous and terrible idea, but a very different from the one the article seems to ascribe to him.

Some of the quotes and sections in the article might be technically accurate in and of themselves, but when strung together, they create one mess of a story. For example, consider the following paragraph: "He added that he was not concerned about "the moral aspect" of such a move, "because to hit our territory, Russian territory from Ukrainian territory, with nuclear weapons, or even to plan it, is a crime." How does this sentence make any sense? If he is not concerned about the moral aspect, why is he calling it a crime, which is clearly a moral statement? Well, what Girkin is actually saying in the interview is quite different (my translation + interpretation of his somewhat inarticulate response): "I will talk about the practical consequences of a nuclear strike by Russia, but I am not even going to touch the moral implications... never mind, I will tell you what I think about the moral implications of hitting Ukraine with nuclear weapons: it is bonkers, and a crime - because it's part of Russia." I may disagree with his territorial logic, but let's be clear - he is definitely concerned about "the moral aspect".

Then there is another gem: "But, he said that "we can hit only if we go to war with NATO," and that it is "not Ukraine that should be hit by NATO countries if they launch aggression." That last part is making my brain hurt. I am not even going to try to make sense of it, because you can't - and I recommend that you don't try it either. It reads like a terrible robo-translation. In the actual interview, what Girkin said was the following: using nuclear weapons should be considered only against NATO countries, and only as a response in the event they attack Russia first.

I reached out to the author of the article, and also posted a clarifying comment on the article's discussion thread. One of the readers responded with: "Thanks, that actually reads sensibly. The Newsweek article reads like gobbledygook".

Product manager's thoughts

Producing good news content is hard.  It's especially hard to make a decent living doing it.  Industry consolidation, the displacement of print by online content, dwindling revenues and thinner margins have led many traditional publications and news shops to shut down.  Competition for the few remaining full time jobs has intensified, while contributors (non full time writers) struggle to make ends meet.  Volume ends up being one way to make up the difference, which leads to shortcuts, errors, and a drop in quality.

Translation adds both complexity and risk.  Luckily, Google's and other robo-translators have come a long way, and do a decent job of generating out quick and reasonably accurate translations - most of the time.  But these simplified statistical translations inevitably fall victim to cultural references, linguistic nuances, and imperfections of natural conversations.  I suspect that many writers and contributors, working furiously to crank out enough content to feed themselves, often don't have the time or the resources to make sure that translations - and interpretations - are totally accurate.  Sure, it might be tough to hack it in the content world these days, but I hope that enough care is taken that we are not reading "gobbledygook" or, worse, unnecessarily stoke the fears of a nuclear escalation.