natali46_1: переводы

→Read it quickly, and it sounds terrifically contrite. Read it carefully, and Mr Hari is actually blaming his interviewees for their lack of verbal polish. It is a nifty defence: there he was, travelling the world to meet all these famous and brilliant people, conducting all these excellent interviews, only to find, on returning to his hotel room to transcribes his tapes, that time and again his subjects had garbled their lines.

→But I was wrong. An interview isn’t an X-ray of a person’s finest thoughts. It’s a report of an encounter. If you want to add material from elsewhere, there are conventions that let you do that. You write “she has said,” instead of “she says”. You write “as she told the New York Times” or “as she says in her book”, instead of just replacing the garbled chunk she said with the clear chunk she wrote or said elsewhere. If I had asked the many experienced colleagues I have here at The Independent – who have always been very generous with their time – they would have told me that, and they would have explained just how wrong I was. It was arrogant and stupid of me not to ask

→I did two wrong and stupid things. The first concerns some people I interviewed over the years. When I recorded and typed up any conversation, I found something odd: points that sounded perfectly clear when you heard them being spoken often don’t translate to the page. They can be quite confusing and unclear. When this happened, if the interviewee had made a similar point in their writing (or, much more rarely, when they were speaking to somebody else), I would use those words instead. At the time, I justified this to myself by saying I was giving the clearest possible representation of what the interviewee thought, in their most considered and clear words.

→But something about the weasel wording of Mr Hari's apology today sticks in the craw. I have also been depressed to see a chorus of well-known journalists leap to Mr Hari's defence, arguing that what he did was silly or foolish, but is not really his fault. One senior colleague of his told me recently that the real problem was that Mr Hari had never gone to journalism school or worked on a newsdesk, but had jumped straight to a career as a columnist, interviewer and foreign correspondent. Mr Hari adopts this own line for himself now, writing today how he rose very quickly in journalism straight from university.

→Allegations of quote-stealing and factual embellishment by Mr Hari have been swirling for months, at first in the blogosphere and then in the mainstream media. I have not posted about the whole sorry saga to date because—at the end of the day—a hack is only a hack, and the press already spends too much time talking and thinking about itself.

→READERS of the Independent were in for a surprise this morning: a lengthy apology from that newspaper's star columnist Johann Hari, admitting to plagiarism and the online harrassment of rival journalists (via pseudonymous assaults on their Wikipedia entries), and announcing that he was off to take a course of journalism training at his own expense.