238: Lost in Translation

Ira Glass

Alex spoke Russian, lived in Russia for a year, worked with Russian refugees in Chicago for two years. And his Russian teacher thought that he only needed one thing to make his life complete.

Ira Glass

So she kept trying to fix him up with Russian women. And this one night, she had him come out with a whole bunch of people, including this woman Elena, who was going to be his date.

Ira Glass

And so when she acted all depressed on their date, she was not actually blowing Alex off like he thought at the time. She was flirting.

So Alex decides to ask his Russian teacher about this theory, that Americans and Russians have completely different views of what it means to fall in love. And I have to say, he's a little bit nervous to try this out on her, because he's worried that maybe it's insulting or stereotyping Russians. But he explains the theory to her.

Ira Glass

Some days seems like every story in the world is the story of cultural misunderstanding. Between people of different countries, Muslims and Christians, blacks and whites, Republicans and Democrats, men and women, Spanish speakers and Anglos, adults and children, rich people and poor people. And so today, in this era of misunderstandings abroad and at home, we bring you an hour of stories about what gets lost in translation.

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Our program today in three culture-bridging acts.

Act One, The Chasm Between Comedy and Music. In that act, two brave people step into that chasm. Drop into that chasm. However you put it.

Act Two, Star of Bethlehem. We bring you the story of the most important, most respected newsman on television in the town of Bethlehem, who does a program that is unlike any news show that you have ever seen.

Act Three. Translating For the Very, Very, Very, Very, Very Tall. In which we have, for a change, on our program a story that gets us close to someone so famous that you may have actually heard of him if you follow pro basketball in the tiniest way. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One. The Chasm Between Comedy and Music.

Well, we start today's program about translation with a story about karaoke. In karaoke, after all, you are the interpreter. You are the translator. You stand there with the words of the song appearing on a little TV monitor and you try to render a life-size performance-- a translation of the original hit, if you will-- rendered in the musical language of you.

And in a way, it's surprising that the only karaoke we have is for music. Why not karaoke of the "I Have a Dream" speech, or the "You talking to me?" from Taxi Driver. Recently Jonathan Goldstein and Starlee Kine, you hear them both on our program from time to time, heard about a karaoke bar which not only had songs, but comedy routines that you could perform onstage. They decided to find out for themselves how stand up comedy translates to the karaoke stage.

Jonathan Goldstein

Starlee and I talk quite a bit about chops. Comedic chops. Pacing, placement of the zinger. When to employ whimsy and when to employ wit. Chops.

Back when we worked in adjoining cubicles, we'd kill time by arguing over what was funny and what wasn't. Blowing cigar smoke in a baby's face? Not funny. A baby smoking a cigar? Funny.

We were like Borscht Belt comedians without the borscht, the belt, or the audience. But the fact that we weren't knocking them dead at Grossinger's every night didn't keep us from coming up with titles for our showbiz bios. Starlee's book was going to be called The Woman Behind the Chops, while I intended to call mine Sir Chops-a-Lot.

Why, just the other day, I was giving young Starlee a quiz. What's the most important thing in comedy? I asked her.

Chops.

So finally, Starlee and I, after years of talking about comedy, actually decided to go out and create comedy. We were going to take it to the stage and tell jokes for an audience at this karaoke bar. We were going to exchange the tweed vestments of the armchair humorologist for the rainbow-striped suspenders of the practitioner. We wanted to see if we had what it took.

The karaoke bar is called The Hidden Cove, and it had catalogs of different comedy routines, all from the late '80s, early '90s. Starlee had already looked through them. She decided she was going to do a man-bashing routine called "Men are Perfect-- Jerks." We talked about the proper delivery.

The difference in our comedic approach is vast, as is our approach to life. At the office where Starlee and I used to work together, people whose names she didn't even know would seek her out, bringing her homemade bread, presenting her with souvenirs from their vacations, and even setting aside her favorite caramel taffies from the communal office candy dish. I, on the other hand, had made the effort to learn the names of their children, grandchildren, and in one case, their pet hamster, Mr. Jinglepot. For all of this, I got nothing.

Starlee had concerns about the caliber of the jokes on the karaoke machine at the bar, how stale they might be. I explained to her that the material, no matter how cliched or boorish, did not matter. A true humorist, I said, could stand on stage and get laughs while reading an eviction notice. It was all in the delivery. It was all about chops.

When we showed up, we learned that The Hidden Cove is a very popular and beloved karaoke bar and it was filled with patrons who came there every week to sing. This was the first week of the Iraq war, and the regulars, just like everyone else, had wanted some diversion, a night away from the news. They took their karaoke very seriously, too. One man was hunched over a tattered notebook that he brought from home in which he had neatly penciled the code numbers of his favorite karaoke songs, row after row of them.

As people got on the stage to sing and dance, there was a general feeling of warmth and beery encouragement in the air. Everyone seemed to know everyone else. And when we asked them about the comedy routines on the karaoke machine, no one could recall ever having seen them done. Even the owners of the bar weren't quite sure what we were talking about.

We finally found a lone page of comedy karaoke material and we signed up to go on. I was after a woman singing a karaoke classic.

Jonathan Goldstein

My routine was called "My Parents Hated Me." My strategy was to deadpan my way through, following each punchline with my patented hapless look.

Nothing. Complete joyless silence.

Some things just don't translate to the karaoke stage. A karaoke machine, for instance, has no instinct for comedic timing. It just keeps scrolling down at the same pace. This means that sometimes you have to wait for a punchline to a joke for several awkward moments after having delivered the setup. It was messing up my chops.

As I walked off the stage, no one in the audience would meet my gaze. Still, given the circumstances, I didn't think I had done that bad. Next up was Starlee.

Ira Glass

Starlee pulls out all these moves. She shrugs her shoulders as if to say, what can you do? She breaks free of the staccato rhythms of the karaoke screen and makes the material her own. She even does this thing where she points your toes inward to make herself look littler, and thus cuter. She was like a pigeon-toed puppy taking its very first steps.

Ira Glass

She was winning over the crowd and getting laughs. My laughs. They took to her in the same way people in the office did.

Jonathan Goldstein

I decided to head back up on stage. I was warmed up and the audience was a little more familiar with my work. Plus, I chose a better routine this time. Earlier I had self-deprecated myself out of laughs. Now, armed with a new selection of material from the karaoke machine, celebrity-bashing jokes from 1992.

Not only were these jokes old and dated, but they were also tasteless and offensive.

Still, I soldiered on, unaware that the grandest failure of timing in the history of comedy was about to unfold.

Before I play you this next bit of tape, I should say, in my own defense, that a karaoke screen holds a weird, hypnotic power. You can't help reading whatever rolls down the screen, and you only figure out the meaning of the words you speak as they are tumbling out of your mouth. And then it's too late.

I'm going to play you the tape now. Please remember, it's not my fault. Don't judge me.

Let me just reiterate. This was during the first week of the Iraq war, and things were not going as easily as America had hoped. American soldiers were dying, and there was no end in sight. A few days earlier or a few days later and my words would not have stung in the same way.

It was not even clear what the audience was booing. It was like they just didn't know what else to do. Perhaps they were booing the sheer extraordinary coincidence at all. Here was this leftover joke from the first Gulf War being told for the first time in over a decade, and being told the very week we had gone back to war with the same country. It was like I just delivered a punchline after a ten year pause.

Stupidly, I still somehow believed I could redeem myself. Instead, what rolled down the screen next was the second most tasteless joke from 1992.

What's Mike Tyson's definition of foreplay? Jesus, that's--

[BOOING]

At this point, the owner actually turned off my mike.

I've always held the greatest gift an entertainer can receive to be laughter that turns into applause. You know, that moment where a wave of laughter climaxes and breaks apart into the kind of appreciative clapping that says to a performer, we can no longer laugh because our sides are hurting with the pain that is too great, so now we will switch to clapping. God bless you, funny wise man.

Now, instead of laughter turning into applause, I was experiencing boos turning into applause as I slunk off the stage.

Ira Glass

Jonathan Goldstein with Starlee Kine. Or is that the other way around?

Ira Glass

Act Two. Star of Bethlehem.

OK, now these possibly helpful geopolitical facts. Most Palestinians don't speak Hebrew. Most Israelis don't speak Arabic. Where Palestinians live, in a place like Bethlehem on the West Bank, Israeli newspapers aren't even for sale. Checkpoints block the passage of civilians from one side to another. All of this to say, each side has very little daily knowledge what the other side is thinking and talking about.

But for the last three and a half years, since the beginning of the current intifada, a Palestinian journalist in Bethlehem had a nightly news program on Bethlehem TV where he translates the Israeli nightly news broadcasts into Arabic, live, in real time. He also translates and summarizes articles from the Israeli newspapers and internet sites. The show is popular in Bethlehem, but it is very complicated speaking your enemy's language. Nancy Updike tells the story.

Nancy Updike

Because he's translating, Nasser Laham is reporting things that have never been reported in the territories before. Things that in the normal course of events are not even talked about in public.

When Yasser Arafat slapped the former head of security for the West Bank, stuck a gun in his face, and said, "I'm going to kill you," Nasser's translation of an Israeli TV report was the only Arabic language broadcast to mention the incident. When an Israeli newspaper published an expose about corruption in the top leadership in Bethlehem, Nasser was the only one who picked the story up, and he broadcast his translation in spite of a flurry of increasingly threatening phone calls from the leaders involved. Soon after, they were all ousted.

And even though the story came from a newspaper in Jerusalem, which is only 15 minutes away from Bethlehem, most likely, no one would have heard about it if Nasser hadn't told the story.

Nancy Updike

All Palestinian media-- newspapers, radio, television, except for private television stations like Bethlehem TV-- are tightly controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Take the way the Palestinian papers covered the recent power struggle between Arafat and the new prime minister, known as Abu Mazen, whose appointment was supposed to be the first step toward a new peace process.

Nancy Updike

Whenever there's a suicide bombing of any size in Israel, Israeli TV goes into nonstop crisis coverage, and Bethlehem TV carries this live, with Nasser translating for hours. You see emergency workers running stretchers with burned and bloody people to ambulances. I watched with a translator of my own. You'll hear Nasser's voice in Arabic, then my translator in English.

Nancy Updike

Nasser interjects these kind of details when he's translating-- she's shivering as she's talking-- because he wants his viewers to know exactly what's happening. They can't hear her voice shaking, so he tells them.

Nancy Updike

In fact, plenty of the details Nasser translates have got to stir outrage rather than sympathy. Nasser's producer told me that one of the reasons Bethlehem TV decided it was important to follow Israel's continuous coverage after a suicide attack is that Israelis speak then without filters. Politicians openly called for what's known as "transfer"-- the removal of all Palestinians from the territories. Ordinary Israelis call for revenge, say the peace process is hopeless because Palestinians are all terrorists.

Nasser translates it all without hedging. Palestinians never use the words "terrorist" or "suicide bomber." They say "shahid"-- "martyr." But when Israel TV says terrorist, Nasser does too.

I'd wanted to meet Nasser ever since I saw this book he published about Arafat, which is so strange and provocative that it's not in any Palestinian political category so much as orbiting all of them. The cover of the book is red with a picture of Arafat smiling, and the title is The Truth, the Whole Truth About Yasir Arafat, The Man Who's Led Fatah and the PLO for 37 Years. On the back it says, "In this book, I put between the hands of the reader what has never been said before about the man who led one of the greatest and longest liberation movements in the world. With all modesty, I present the reader with information in opposition to what Palestinian, Arabic, Islamic, Western, and Israeli research and study have determined about this man.

When you open the book, it's empty. All the pages are blank, except the very first page, where Nasser invites the readers to fill the book with their own opinions. "I'm confident that you'll have something to write," he says "because every person views President Arafat as he wishes."

Half the Palestinians I show the book to get really angry. The other half burst out laughing, at least in part due to shock. You just don't see this kind of joke-- an absurdist prank-- in the Territories, where the situation is so dire, where everyone feels like the entire world is against them and their leader.

In general, Nasser's sense of humor is pretty dark. One time, he was telling me how much the Arab world hates Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon He offered this prescription for fighting al-Qaeda and achieving world peace.

Nancy Updike

Not everyone Nasser taught Hebrew to is so hopeful about it.

Nancy Updike

Nasser taught this guy in prison. He says speaking Hebrew helps if you want to have a personal conversation with an Israeli, gets to know their life. But when it comes to politics, knowing the language doesn't make any difference at all. The same walls are there, just more clearly.

Still, if your only two choices or violence or talking, Nasser chooses talking. He and Mohammed are part of a group of people who do training for community leaders in nonviolence and what they call "compassionate listening--" how to listen to someone you really, really disagree with. Nasser is against suicide bombings, feels that the Palestinian people have a right to resist, but that the armed resistance is not working at all.

Given all this, given his politics, I was surprised by some of the things I saw on Bethlehem TV. One day there were hours of song celebrating martyrs to the Palestinian cause, including suicide bombers. Another time, I saw an unforgettably baroque video celebrating Saddam Hussein.

[SINGING IN ARABIC]

Picture a plump man in a long, blue tunic smiling, singing, and pumping a machine gun up and down in time to the music. Behind him, a crowd of men in uniform is moving their guns and dancing in time, also. They're holding a large picture of Saddam Hussein in front of them. Then Saddam himself appears onscreen in a fedora, firing a pistol in the air and smiling. Then the Iraqi army is jogging, followed by anti-aircraft guns shooting, and soldiers marching, and tanks moving against the sunset, and mosques, and more of Saddam in the fedora.

This was April. The war in Iraq was long over.

When I ask Nasser about it, he tells me not everything on the program reflects his own political views. People call and request these videos all the time, so he plays them. But then he also broadcasts stuff they don't request.

Nancy Updike

By the time he was done, Nasser translated several days of Israel's annual commemoration of the Holocaust. Rest assured this doesn't happen on any other Arabic language station.

I spent a day interviewing people around Bethlehem about what they think of the show.

Nancy Updike

Almost everyone I talk to watches the program and loves it. People say they do get information there that they can't get anywhere else. One man told me that when the second intifada started, the only way you could find out which Palestinians were wanted by the Israelis and why was by watching Nasser's translation of Israeli TV.

Nancy Updike

Bethlehem, where the TV station is, is a dusty, broken down, depressing place. Most businesses are dead or on the ropes. No parks, no pools. In the summer, people often have running water only once a week, or even every two weeks. Israeli army vehicles roll through practically every day, sometimes to demolish a house, and the neighbors pull chairs onto their roofs and sit watching the destruction, since most don't have jobs. There are 12 Israeli settlements within 10 miles of Bethlehem, and they're growing.

Nasser told me that when he was at work one day, he looked up at the television and saw his own kids, his 11 year old twins, on TV, throwing stones at Israeli tanks and soldiers. He was alarmed. Kids have been shot and killed throwing stones.

He talked to them about it that night. "Why are you throwing stones?" he said. "Because they're the enemy," they told him. "Who told you that?" he asked. "The kids at school," they said.

I asked him if he told them to stop throwing stones, and he said of course. Three, four, five times he told them. And then they started lying and saying they hadn't thrown stones when he knew they had. He doesn't know what to do. When he talks to friends, Israeli journalists, on the phone at home, his 11 year old daughter Beirut says, "I heard you talking Hebrew. Don't talk to those people."

Nasser has been trying to teach his kids Hebrew, so I interviewed the four of them. None of the kids see learning Hebrew as a bridge to peace the way their dad does. For them it's way more utilitarian. It helps you talk to soldiers, they say. Maybe it can get you out of a bad situation.

Nancy Updike

Beirut's twin brother Marcel, a tiny boy with a large retainer in his mouth, jumps in.

Nancy Updike

He takes a drag of his cigarette and smiles.

Nancy Updike

Nasser speaks Hebrew and he's teaching his kids, but actual Israelis are a world away, and he can't convince his own children, a genuine captive audience, not to hate them.

Ira Glass

Nancy Updike in Jerusalem.

Coming up. Start a show in a karaoke bar, end a show in a karaoke bar. No matter how little it has to do with the last story and the last act, can we do it? Dare we do it? Answer is in a minute from Chicago Public Radio and Public International when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose some theme, bring you a variety of different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's program, Lost in Translation. We've arrived at Act Three of our show.

Act Three. Translating For the Very, Very, Very, Very, Very, Very Tall.

Well friends, we've heard about the struggles between Palestinians and Israelis, between Russians and Americans. In this act, we ask the age old question, can there ever be peace between the tall and the short? Can people of different heights ever hope to get along? Jesse Hardman tackled the issue.

Jesse Hardman

My earliest memory of my cousin Colin is fighting with him over a Fernando Valenzuela baseball card. We were both seven years old, both way into sports and pretty competitive. Mainly we'd play basketball. If you ask me, I'm a little bit better than he is. Don't ask him.

After graduating from college, Colin headed straight to Taiwan and stayed there for almost three years, just knocking around, trying to figure out what he wanted to do with this life. He took classes, worked a few jobs. He also played a lot of basketball with locals at nearby gyms. This left him with a very specialized, but seemingly a marketable vocabulary.

Jesse Hardman

When I caught up with Colin two summers ago, he was working for the US government in a dead end job, translating Chinese documents. He was determined to start being practical. The words "law school" forced their way out of his mouth. You could tell he was hitting the career default button. Then an old friend stepped in.

Jesse Hardman

Two weeks later, my cousin had made the jump from owning baseball cards to working for one. Sort of.

Jesse Hardman

It turns out that Colin's new job wasn't with some benchwarming experiment. Yao Ming is the starting center for the Houston Rockets. And if you haven't heard of him, congratulations. You officially know nothing about sports in America. He's the biggest story out of the NBA this year. The first foreigner ever to go number one in the NBA draft. His style of play is supposed to revolutionize the game the same way that Michael Jordan's did. Add to this, he has the hopes and dreams of a billion emerging NBA fans in Asia riding on his shoulders. And Colin met him for the first time the same day the rest of America did.

Jesse Hardman

Early in the season, I catch up with Colin at a game in Minnesota. My first chance to see his new life from the inside.

Jesse Hardman

We stand in a nondescript concrete hallway near the visiting locker room. Players are walking by, ribbing Colin and smacking him on the ass. Superstars like Glen Rice and Steve Francis, Colin's idol since college. Guys I'm used to seeing on TV.

Colin disappears into the Rockets' locker room. A few minutes later, he reappears with his new boss, Yao Ming.

Yao is 7'5". Colin's my height, 5'9" in shoes. Yao slouches up against the locker room wall. Colin leans in next to him. A crush of TV cameras, microphones, and notepads descend on the pair. Lots of the reporters are from Asia.

Jesse Hardman

It's a month into the season, and media fascination with Yao's story is bigger than anyone imagined. Yao is the only player who reporters want to talk to before and after every game, regardless of how he plays.

The questions tend to be the same in every city. Questions about adapting to the NBA and life in America. What do you do in your spare time? Have you sampled the local cuisine? And of course--

Jesse Hardman

For the most part, Yao feeds them straight sports cliche. One day at a time. I'm still learning the game. But every once in a while, he'll give them an answer that leaves reporters scratching their heads. Like this question, when the reporter asks, what's it like to play against Minnesota star Kevin Garnett?

Jesse Hardman

The bulk of Colin's translating work is just getting Yao through these daily press conferences. Yao speaks enough English to communicate with coaches and players during games and practices, but Colin sits with the team courtside, just in case.

Jesse Hardman

Fast forward two hours. Fourth quarter. Rockets down by six with a few minutes to go.

Jesse Hardman

So much for professional demeanor.

Jesse Hardman

Colin's up out of his seat, looking like he wants a piece of the ref. But if anything, this actually helps him fit in with the team. Here's backup center Kelvin Cato and backup point guard Richie Norris.

Jesse Hardman

And it's not just the players who glow about Colin. A Rockets executive tells me that most NBA translators are just linguists with no feeling for the game, but Colin's made it way easier for Yao.

Even the press loves him. Sam Smith is a veteran basketball beat writer for the Chicago Sun-Times.

Jesse Hardman

Here's what most of my cousin's glamorous job looks like up close. Usually he and Yao are nowhere near a basketball court. Usually he's not even translating. Right here, Colin is trying to get Yao to the DMV so he can take his driver's test. It's part of Colin's job to be Yao's driving instructor.

The problem today is, a National Geographic film crew wants to tag along. Colin can't find Yao's dad, who's also taking the test, and Yao is hungry. Colin literally can't go 10 minutes without having his cell phone ring, and it's never for him. Yao's agents, people from the Rockets, from the press, from the companies Yao endorses, even Yao's parents-- they all get to him through Colin.

Jesse Hardman

Here's something else. Colin lives with Yao in a huge house, in a gated community, in a Houston suburb, together with Yao's mother and father, who keep a tight leash on their 22 year old son. Originally, Colin was supposed have his own place, but the Yaos invited him into the house early in the season. He thought about it and decided it made sense, since he'd be spending almost every minute with Yao anyway.

Jesse Hardman

It'd be strange to move back in with your own family at 29, let alone a Chinese family you just met, which doesn't speak English, and whose shortest member, Yao's mom, is a half foot taller than you.

Colin doesn't like talking about his home life with the Yaos. That's private. So private that he never has anyone over to visit, friends or family. He can't even invite me in for a beer.

Jesse Hardman

Two days after Yao passes his driving test, I tag along with him and Colin as they head home from practice. They sing along to the radio together. They finish each other's sentences and tease each other in a mixture of English and Chinese.

Jesse Hardman

Their bond has been formed through an intense mutual experience. The world of the NBA is foreign to both of them.

Jesse Hardman

Three fourths of the way through the basketball season, I catch a Rockets game at Madison Square Garden in New York City. It's a packed house, despite the fact the New York team, the Knicks, suck.

Almost a third of the crowd is Chinese, many of them attending their first NBA game. They're here because of Yao, who's now a full-fledged phenomenon. He's only been in the US for four months, but he's already the new face of Apple Computer, Gatorade, and Visa.

To the surprise of the normal Knicks crowd, Yao's army comes ready to scream, and many have made homemade signs proclaiming their love of Yao.

Jesse Hardman

That's right. Pakistan. This is the power of Yao Ming. He's united the Asian mainland with the Indian subcontinent.

Just to see how far his celebrity extends, I ask this 22 year old fan about my cousin.

Jesse Hardman

I'm floored by this. And my question of the night becomes, who's Colin Pine?

Jesse Hardman

One woman knows so much about him, that she could have written this story.

Jesse Hardman

In my very informal survey, 50% of the crowd knows my cousin my name. One Chinese-American coed who carries a sign saying, "I'm single and bilingual-- hey Yao, you and me, let's mingle" tells me my cousin's hot. Colin's heard it before.

Jesse Hardman

On a warm spring night, Yao, Colin, and I are out at a Chinese karaoke bar. Yao just passed his driving exam and he wants to celebrate. He never goes out. This is a really big deal. He's out of the house and his parents aren't around.

The club sits in a stucco Chinese mini mall in a cookie cutter Houston suburb between a nail salon and a takeout place called The Fancy Noodle. Everyone has a couple of beers, but this is definitely the G-rated version of an NBA night out.

Jesse Hardman

Colin loves karaoke. He sings a Chinese love ballad with an English chorus-- "I Only Want To Be Your Friend." Yao, appropriately enough, responds with the Backstreet Boys hit, "Larger Than Life."

Jesse Hardman

Yao later tells me this night was the most fun he's had in America.

Ira Glass

Jesse Hartman.

Ira Glass

You know you can download audio of our program at audible.com/thisamericanlife, where they have public radio programs, bestselling books, even the New York Times, all at audible.com.

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. Nancy Updike's story was part of the Hearing Voices project, which gets funding from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and is online at hearingvoices.com.

[FUNDING CREDITS]

WBEZ management oversight for our show by Torey Malatia, who calls me up drunk at least once a week and says,

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

PRI. Public Radio International.