The Misidentification of the Character

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If and when relationships are measured by size, quantity, and attribute and so described, Dano said, "then the translators of the English documents should make their best efforts possible" to convey the exact relationships. But more often than not the writers of the Korean version fail to do that by equivocating or prevaricating, taking advantage of the linguistic leeway and generous readers.

Text:
For some reason, said Brin, "people underestimated the importance of finding information, as opposed to other things you would do online. If you are searching for something like a health issue, you really want to know, in some cases it is a life-and-death matter. We have people who search Google for heart-attack symptoms and then call nine-one-one." But sometimes you really want to in-form yourself about something much simpler.

When I was in Beijing in June 2004, I was riding the elevator down one morning with my wife, Ann, and sixteen-year-old daughter, Natalie, who was carrying a fistful of postcards written to her friends. Ann said to her, "Did you bring their addresses along?" Natalie looked at her as if she were positively nineteenth-century. "No," she said, with that you-are-so-out-of-it-Mom tone of voice. "I just Googled their phone numbers, and their home addresses came up." (The World Is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman, p.155) (The Korean version, p.205)

Dano's comments:
It often occurs that people get lost and lose their cherished families. But the writer mustn't get lost and lose track of his or her characters. It's a disgrace that the Korean translator was missing in the evident typographical trails and because of the trauma he couldn't recognize who was who.

As a result, the innocent readers of the Korean version were forced to meet Brin, who had been Google's founding CEO, with wife and his sixteen-year-old daughter. It's because the writer of the Korean version of The World Is Flat "fell suddenly ill" and mistook Thomas L. Friedman and his family for Brin's. Thus, the translator ended up mistaking the first-person pronoun "I" in the second paragraph as the founder of Google instead of Mr. Friedman, with Friedman's daughter turing into Brin's. I wish you could read the Korean version.