translation from the Italian

Submitted by Stephanie Cook (United States), Mar 5, 2007 at 17:59

Dear Mr. Pipes,

I enjoy receiving your interesting and well-written articles via e-mail.

This is a very trivial and nit-picking point, but one which might be useful. English is my mother tongue and it is only as a reasonably literate English speaker that I offer the following observation.

I was struck by the mistranslation of the Italian word "l'inconscienza" as the English word "innocence." The obvious English equivalent to most English-speaking readers would surely be "unconsciousness", or "unawareness". And if that made no sense to the translator, he/she might have wanted to look it up in an Italian/English dictionary and would have found that "inconscienza" is defined as " recklessness, thoughtlessness, unconsciousness".

I know this sounds trivial, but in an article dealing with misquoting or worse, about making false statements, it is probably a good idea to look up the meaning of a word that one is not sure about--and which makes no sense in the context of the sentence.

Carry on and keep up the good work!

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