6 Mistranslations That Changed The World | Cracked.com

6 Mistranslations That Changed The World | Cracked.com

Another Cracked misfire. They are getting sloppy. The urban legend is not that Krushchev said "we will bury you," but that it was all merely a mistranslation. He said, «Нравится вам или нет, но история на нашей стороне. Мы вас похороним». --- "You may like it or not, but history is on our side. We will bury you." ---

He later explained that he did not mean to imply that he would bury us in rubble, but rather that socialism would still be around when capitalism was dead. His clarification was quite fair, but the original statement was not mistranslated. That statement requires clarification because it is ambiguous, and it's equally ambiguous in Russian. The problems it caused had nothing to do with the translation, but rather the ambiguity. If we all understood Russian perfectly, we would have made all the same assumptions we actually did make.