Was a translational error responsible for Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Some psycholinguists believe that the Whorfian hypothesis is responsible for the United States' use of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II. True or not, here's the argument:
When it became clear to the Allies that they were in possession of what seemed like a weapon to end all weapons, the famous Potsdam Declaration was issued to Japan, offering an ultimatum -- end the war at once by way of unconditional surrender, or face the consequences. This posed a very difficult problem to the Japanese military authorities, who suspected from their intelligence sources what the bomb could do -- yet who wanted very much to find a face-saving way short of unconditional surrender to end the war.
Unfortunately, their reply, while perhaps clear enough in Japanese, was untranslatable into English. They responded, "We mokusatsu the Potsdam Declaration" -- the word mokusatsu being one of about 20 possible ways in Japanese to respond to a "yes or no" question, and unfortunately being one of the most ambiguous. As stated above, it can't really be translated into English (certainly not by a single word, for there is no English equivalent). But it might roughly be paraphrased as, "We are going to agree in due time with your demands; you know it and we know it; but let's both pretend that we have not yet agreed, so that we can save face by not seeming to cave in too soon to your demands."
Regrettably, the junior State Department official in charge of translating the Japanese reply lacked the necessary linguistic sophistication, and missed the subtle subtext of the reply altogether. Instead, he reached for a Japanese-English dictionary and translated mokusatsu by the closest single-word English equivalent, which happens to be "ignore": "We ignore the Postdam Declaration." The result? The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though the original intent of the message may well have been quite different: "We pretend on the surface to ignore the Postdam Declaration [but you know better, or you should]."
Is this a correct explanation of what really happened? I'll leave that to the history department, but it has a certain credibility. English is a very black/white language compared to many Asiatic languages. In most languages of European origin, there is yes and there is no, with little in between... not so in many other language communities.