• E BBC ' s YUGOSLAV SERVICE Carleton Greene seems to confuse
the !ssue by stressing that the service is 'firmly in British But is British necessarily synonymous with eknraPetent-this may be doubted in the case of tu.roadcasts to a country whose languages and tradi- t,n)ns are so different from our own. We are certain at the control is British, but we ask ourselves "nether it can be effective when serious linguistic andPsychological misunderstandings arise, as they are bound to. L.,How many translators have taken upon themselves .1r:transpose' the text? 'This is not what I said,' I"' „Inted out Briand at one of the first reunions of !rte League of Nations in Geneva. 'No,' answered the Lnterpreter, 'but it is what you should have said.' :nem are so many intermediaries between the British :nice and the Yugoslav listener that more or less Intentional deviations from the accepted line of 1tey (by the way, is there such a line? The example the Forties can hardly be quoted, as we were at "ar then and knew where our duty lay) must occur. fi It is alleged that such deviations from impartiality assume that impartiality is our line) tend to be Z'lateral, i.e., in favour of the Tito regime. The !Iritish taxpayer ought to be-and in this individual isste demands to be-told whether this is deliberate which case he will no doubt be as respectful c!' the raison d'etat as Mr. Greene would like him d'oe be (although he may wonder just how indepen- tont' the BBC is from the F0)-or whether it is due such misunderstandings as I tnention.ed above. The clotlre might then consist of a reappraisal of the per- nnel policy at the lower levels and less autocratic Ysticism at the higher.-Yours faithfully,
FREDERICK CLIFFORD-VAUGHAN
27 Clanricarde Gardens, W7
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