Have you heard about this?
One of the countless controversies this person has provoked in less than a month as president has to do with Spanish, so, as a Spanish translator, I had to talk about it.
What do you think?
Video Transcript
The White House removes Spanish from its website and social media again.
Yes—a couple weeks ago, as soon as Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States, the Spanish version of the White House website disappeared, as well as the social media profiles in Spanish —something he already did during his previous term in office—.
And although it is a very ugly gesture on his part towards the entire Spanish-speaking community in the country (because, after all, it is the second most widely spoken language there) and has clear political implications, I have seen some misleading headlines.
But isn’t your account about linguistics and communication? Well, yes, that’s what I’m going to talk about.
According to some media reports, something very curious happened in the first hours after closing the Spanish website.
Right now, when you try to access it, you get the typical 404 error screen that tells you that the page doesn’t exist, with this button that says “Go to Homepage”. But this is an updated version, because at first THIS is what that button said: “Go Home”. (As you may know, this wording is usually used to tell someone to go back to their country).
Obviously, within the semantic field of the internet and websites, it is an innocent button that invites you to go to the homepage, as we see here in other examples, but many people have interpreted this as a clear covert verbal attack on migrants, taking advantage of the double meaning.
However, even if doing something like that sounds like Trump, the fact is that the “Go Home” button appeared on all the pages that were no longer available, including those on the English version of the website, which dismantles that theory. I imagine that when they realised that it sounded awful in the context of trying to access the Spanish website, they changed the button to “Go to Homepage”, which is what now appears on the entire website.
Because, why use a simple button to invite you to leave, when they can remove the language that represents you from the entire website?
Yours,
Almudena
