Phew! Finally we know, why there have already been so many problems in the communication between in-debted Greece and its good-will Creditors. The real secret truth is finally out. The problem has its deepest deepest roots in the fact that these bold Greeks do indeed speak and write Greek! …and not desperado Esperanto, a mix of all the languages the creditors themselves and their technical teams claim to be skilled in.
In the truly and honestly ridiculous article of German daily DIE WELT – a first degree cousin of tabloid BILD- “Greeks hide behind their language” it has been claimed that: “There is a banal reason why the Greece’s creditors cannot control whether Greeks implement their reforms-commitments.” And this banal reason is the language, the Greek language!
“The problem already starts with the language. Already in the past, Athens could drive to bankruptcy because institutions like the European Commission and the European Central Bank could understand only a small part of the public debate in Greece,” notes DIE WELT probably in shock of its own stupidity and ignorance as it did not came earlier to such a groundbreaking conclusion.
“We could not understand what was going on because we could not read the Greek newspapers,” a ECB-banker with year-long experience of Greece told Die Welt.
The German daily complains that “even nowadays the government and the parliament can still create lack of transparency” and criticizes that “although the website of the Greek Parliament has versions in English and French [but oh no German!!!], many documents and links are still in Greek.”
And you know what’s worse? When austerity bills come to Parliament for voting, the sneaky Greek government “inserts clauses” in tiny Greek letters’ that undermine the whole reform bill with the effect that the non-Greek-speaking creditors realize the changes when already it’s too late.
This is the moment when a reader stops reading DIE Welt article and burst into loud laughter. But The German daily continues and stresses that “creditors’ controllers often lack the specific skills to control.”
Apparently neither DIE WELT, nor Greece’s creditors from the ECB have ever thought that a team of skilled and paid translators could do the job.
However, on second though, both DIE WELT and the ECB-controllers could be right: Greeks should have adopted the German language and the WELT’s stupidity long long time ago and save modern readers from having to undergo such a torture by reading even a few sentences of such a worthless junk collection of pointless things. The product of mental diarrhea, so to say.
What is amazing is that it needed whole three (3) German DIE WELT journalists to write such a crap.
Urban dictionary defines <crap> as “An annoying turd that floats in the bottom of your toilet and after 100000 flushes its still there.”
PS There is a nice German proverb and word play: Wer nichts wird, wird Wirt. It translates in the sense of ” If you’re professionally challenged, you can always become a bartender.” – Or a DIE WELT journo, or even a European-Central-banker, I suppose…
This is what the highly skilled, multi lingual, humble interpreter is for.
Ooh, dem sneaky Greeks! Fancy speaking Greek, the buggers! No wonder the Germans are dazed and confused.
Still, they’ll probably fix that by demanding that the Greeks speak German or no bail-out money. Might as well make ’em speak German – a few more years of this austerity malarkey and Greece will be re-named Bavaria-on-Sea anyway.
well said! Your ref to Bavaria-on-Sea may not be too far from the truth…
Ridiculous nonsense! The European Commission is packed full of expatriate Greeks; and Germany has a very large number of resident Greek-Germans who could easily be employed in a variety of capacities, if needed. All of the ones I know are very torn between their ties to Germany and Greece, and would probably welcome the chance to help.
Just very poor German propaganda, is what this is.
the article could have been written in the sense of “stupid Troika doesn’t hire translators”. But biased German populist press twisted the fact blaming the Greeks instead.
Springerpress=biased German populist press
that fits rather well no matter whether its bild or welt
They needed three writers to go to the Troika’s most favourite bordellos to find translators of this background information.
M’dame X: “One was telling us every time he was drunken that he is such a dick as after 5 years to speak no Greek is such a shame … Poor boy… but we translated everything they needed because real translators were boycotting treachery.”
Theloun…theloun…zitane….doulema psilo gazi kai antistasi oi mlks
Die Welt and Bild belong both to Springer. Mrs Friede Springer is a good friend of Mrs Merkel. The husband of Mrs Merkel is Mr Joachim Sauer who is a member of board of the Friede Springer foundation.
Just for your information
aaaa, the First Husband has such an important position? I didn’t know
Yes he is, so what?!? It is a philantropical foundation giving money to PhD students. BIG thing!!!
She has kept the name of her first husband Ulrich Merkel. Since 1988 Angela Merkel is married to Joachim Sauer a professor of chemistry at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Unfortunately she didn’t take the name of her very first husband Mr. Putin from their lucky time they’ve spend together at KGB/FDJ
Sounds like they were using Bing to translate for them 🙂
Well, they tried imposing that everybody (not Jewish, Roma, gay, commie, etc.) speaks German 70 years ago. That everybody would in Europe is their big wet dream.