Anus motion/Übersetzungsprobleme

Matthew Baldwin of The Morning News reports - or reported - that Spanish-speaking drivers have been getting out of drunk driving cases because of a deficiency in Spanish-language cards used by traffic cops:

“But the defense somehow got a copy of the Spanish language card that the officer read from, and noticed that the little squiggle was missing from above an ‘n’ in the sentence: ‘¿Tiene veinteuno años?’ In English that literally translates to ‘Do you have 21 years?’—in other words, this was just a routine question to make sure the guy was an adult.

This sounds apocryphal, but I can’t trace it at Snopes. But parts sound convincing:

“The best part is that the defense attorney can’t even bring himself to say the word ‘anus.’ Instead, he calls it ‘the back region.’ We’re going in front of a judge next week, and I’m going to make a point of saying the word ‘anus’ as many times as I can during the proceeding. I even got them to call the legal brief ‘The Anus Motion,’ so he won’t even be able to refer to it by title.

Here’s a warning for those interviewing and writing about Latinos.

(Via the Forensic Linguistics mailing list)