The lawyer coordinating the defence of those charged in the case against the Catalan independence process, Gonzalo Boye, has said this Tuesday that he will inform the Belgian court of an "error" in the French translation of comments by Spanish judge Pablo Llarena. The comments are part of the basis for a civil lawsuit brought against the judge in Belgium by president Carles Puigdemont among others.
The error comes from an aside from the judge in a comment on the nature of the facts under investigation. He said, in Spanish, "si es que ha sido así", which was reportedly translated into French as "et oui c'est ce qui s'est produit". In Spanish, "si" means if, the word for "yes", or "oui" in French, in "sí", with an accent on the i. In other words, instead of reading "if that's what happened" in conditional, the translation says "and yes, that's what happened".
No "change" to the lawsuit
Boye emphatically denied that there exists any "change" and suggested that it "might be a mistake by the translator". "We'll ask the translator about it and we'll inform the court, but that doesn't change the lawsuit at all," he said.
For the lawyer, there's "an excess of nervousness and patriotism" because "the matter isn't being read well", as Llarena says "quite a lot more [in the statements] than is being explained".
The discrepancy was pointed out on social media by a Spanish-speaking French teacher.