a blog by Peter Leonard
Much has been written about the acquisition of the Sweden-based Metro International by TimesCo (parent company of the New York Times and Washington Post.) Metro, which distributes free color newspapers, supported by advertising, in the subways of Helsinki and Stockholm, has recently started expanding into North America. But US executives were embarassed when it surfaced that two high-ranking employees of Metro, Steve Nylund and Hans Holger-Albrecht, used racially offensive langauge at two separate business meetings in 2003.
A story this week in the Boston Globe offers the company line:
Nylund apologized for the racially disparaging remarks, saying he made them inadvertently while translating a joke into English. Metro International also acknowledged that Albrecht had "awkwardly and inappropriately" used a racial slur, and apologized.
Let's take these two cases one at a time...
Holger-Albrecht allegedly began a speech in English with the phrase "Ladies and Gentlemen and N - - - - -s," apparently a wierd attempt at humor, parodying German President Lübke's infamous opening line in Liberia during a visit therein 1962. He explained himself thusly in the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet:
Jag höll ett tal inför 250 människor och ville skoja om mitt tyska ursprung, och att tyskar inte är kända som några stora talare. Jag refererade ett tal som en tysk politiker höll 1962, för att visa att de inte skulle förvänta sig så mycket av mig som talare... I gave a speech in front of 250 people and wanted to joke about my German origin, and that Germans are not known as good speakers. I made reference to a speech which a German politician gave in 1962, to show that they shouldn't expect much of me as a speaker...I'm no expert in German, but Holger-Albrecht may have tripped himself up on the false cognate between neger in his language (as well as Swedish) and the English n-word. As a well-informed Swede pointed out in the comment area of the Svenska Dagbladet story,
Många som skrivit in säger att 'neger' inte ar sa farligt. Men detta var inte vad han sa. Neger kan ingen direkt oversättning till Engelska, kanske 'Negro'. Problemet är att han sa 'n - - - - -' vilket for dem som pratar Engelska som modersmål ar ett ofattbart vidrigt ord i en vit mans mun: det var vad slavhandlarna kallade slavarna. Many who wrote in say that 'neger' isn't so bad. But wasn't what he said. Neger can't be directly translated into English, maybe 'Negro.' The problem is that he said 'n- - - - -' which for native English-speakers is an unbelievably disgusting word in a white man's mouth: it was what the slave traders called the slaves.If only Holger-Albrecht -- a high ranking media executive -- had shown as much insight into language as an anonymous Swedish internet user, he might still have a job.
As for Steve Nylund, the (now-former) CEO of Metro USA, he seems to have used the same word when translating, on the fly, a joke being relayed to him over a Cell phone during a company event. The joke was told in Swedish, and Nylund re-told it in real time to his audience in English. He presumably fell victim to the same "neger" / n-word confusion his co-worker Holger-Albrecht did. For better or worse, this genre of joke is not unheard of in Scandinavia, though the one Nylund told was apparently pretty tasteless.
I was once in Sweden taking a literature course, and the selected reading for that day was a short story entitled "En Neger." The attempts of the various Europeans (from Germany, France, Belgium, etc) to translate the title into English would have gotten them in as much trouble as Nylund and Holger-Albrecht landed in. As it was, I and the only other American in the classroom had to do a bit of emergency language sensitivity-training.