Speck-ham
IT was meant to be funny and should not have been taken so seriously.
Its back to smile school for Herr Tobias Holtkamp, the journalist at German tabloid Bild who went in with his studs up on the family Beckham.
The English translation makes it sound much worse than I intended, says the man the Sun calls a blond geek.
Granted, things can alter in translation. When the hunk in trunks that is David Hasselhoff sang I paid a lot of dues/ had plenty to lose/ travelling across the land/ Worked on a farm/ got some muscle in my arms Germans heard an order to tear down the Berlin Wall. Native English speakers just heard soft rock and the squeak of chest hair on shiny leather.
And Holtkamp is happy to tell us how things got lost in translation in his article. In German, says he, speck was used as a play on words which means that you have a big stomach and you are overweight. I did not mean to say she [Joanne Beckham] looked like a pig.
And in case the Sun cant see the value in puns and word play, Holtkamp reminds it and us that his is a funny column in a tabloid. It was not supposed to be a personal attack.
Resisting the urge to rebrand Holtkamp as Meinkampf or Concentrationkamp and so display its own quick way with words, the paper prefers to hear what David Beckham thinks of it.
As does the Star, which says its a krautrage. In the Mirror, Beckham says: I dont want to give these people more publicity then theyve already had…Im not accepting it but you have to realise there are some people out there who are a little bit sad.
Which translates roughly into German as: I hope we beat them on penalties and they all end up speaking French…
Posted: 14th, June 2006 | In: Tabloids Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
