ONT TV channel distorted quotes of Western mass media about Lukashenka’s meeting with Pope

• 29.04.2009, 12:15

Reviewing foreign mass media, representatives of the Belarusian ONT TV Channel have made serious mistakes in translation.

As oldmah writes in his blog, such “a random error” has slipped in the translation of the report of the BBC radio, where the word “democratic” was substituted by “diplomatic”.

The ONT reported the following:

“BBC views the visit of the Belarusian president to Rome as a step of rapprochement of Belarus and Europe and called it a diplomatic evolution. Authors of the report also tell in detail about the meeting of Alyaksandr Lukashenka with the pope”.

In reality the BBC called the event by the words of Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini “a democratic evolution” in the subtitle to the text.

“Responding to criticism of the official visit in the newspaper Corriere della Sera, Mr Frattini said it was intended to help Belarus “take up a gradual path of democratic evolution” and “encourage a progressive nearing of Belarus to Europe and its democratic standard”, - the blogger quotes the exact words as said by the radio.