What a difference a couple of letters make! Hillary Clinton presented her Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov with a mock "reset" button designed to signify the United States' willingness to improve relations with Moscow. Instead of translating 'reset' correctly as perezagruzka (перезагрузка), the American translation read peregruzka, which does not mean "reset" in this sense, it means "overload". It wasn't exactly a translation; it was a transliteration, as the word was written in the Latin alphabet, not in Cyrillic letters.
I would normally have a lot of sympathy for someone trying to translate a "set" word into Russian. "Set" takes up 18 pages in the Oxford English Dictionary since it has so many meanings, and it is never easy to translate into another language. But still, you'd think that the US government could find a few experts, or even a few ordinary native Russian speakers to check with. What's worse, though, is the fact that the word wasn't even written in the Russian alphabet.
Read more in English in this BBC article. The Kommersant article referred to is here if you'd prefer to read the story in Russian.
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