Lost In Translation
CBS World Watch needs a new translator as witnessed by this headline: Russian, Cuban Presidents Meet Over A Nice Plate Of Lard.
They weren’t eating “lard”, which is rendered pork fat, they were eating salo which is similar to pork rinds. It is the skin and attached fat from the back of the pig which is then heavily salted, or possibly covered in pepper or paprika to preserve it. It is called salo because it is salted.
The Russians tend to slice it thin and cook it slightly before eating it on rye bread. Others eat it cold. It is the equivalent of salted butter on rye. It is really a form of bar food, as it is normally associated with drinking vodka. It does nothing good for your cardiovascular system with its high sodium and fat content.
We would fry it and call it pork rinds, but they generally don’t have as much salt and the fat layer is thinner than salo.
For whatever reason, “sky-blue salo” is a derogatory term for gays in Russian. Vladimir Sorokin got in a lot of trouble for his novel, Goluboe Salo (Sky-Blue Salo), but he never plays nice with any government in power.
3 comments
The lard is my shepherd’s pie; I shall not want…
(And indeed I don’t want that!)
But of course this is no different than the persistent mis-translation of the word “God” by the western press. That is, when the word “God” is uttered by someone Islamic, it is almost always represented by the transliteration “Allah”, which of course means “God” in Arabic, rather than by its literal translation. Everything else gets translated into English, but not “God”.
It’s all about the propaganda, in the end. Our Western press is Pravda and Izvestia with more cunning editors. You can still find out the truth from it, but you have to strip out the propaganda first to clearly see the morsels of truth within.
Badux´s last blog post..The taxonomy of pain
Obviously not a choice for a lot of people, be they vegetarian or one on many religious groups, but grilled it really is the same as cheap bacon.
Well, we can’t possibly pass up a chance to mislead people about other cultures or their might be peace breaking out all over the world. The best lies are half-truths.