Recently, I hosted a community potluck, mostly comprised of international students. One of them is taking a masters level course in interpretation. When, as it does, the conversation switched to politics, or more specifically, President Trump, I couldn’t resist showing one of my favorite bits of comedy on the challenges of translating Trump. There was general hilarity during the clip, until it got to the quote, “grab ‘em by the —–!” The air was sucked out of the room in a collective gasp then stunned disbelief accompanied by many iterations of “he really said that?!?”
At the end of the evening, I approached the interpreter one-on-one to ask his permission to write about this incident. He is from a communist country, “has no religion”, and yet has the moral code and sense of decency that warrants being shocked at such crude language coming from a head of state. Oh, that American Evangelicals would have that same sensibility.
