© UnknownUS Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (R) and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov hit the mistranslated button on Friday.
Daily newspaper Kommersant carried the story of Friday's meeting under the punning title of "Sergei Lavrov and Hillary Clinton push the wrong button," the BBC reported Saturday.
The piece referred to an embarrassing moment for the US during the first contact between Moscow and the new Washington administration on Friday, which both parties later described as successful regarding progress in improving recently stained relations.
Clinton's surprise goodwill gift was a simple plastic button with the words "reset" in English and "peregruzka" as the Russian translation to symbolized Vice President Joe Biden's earlier statement that "the US wants to reset relations with Russia."
"We worked hard to get the right Russian word. Do you think we got it?" Clinton Secretary of State Clinton asked Lavrov.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov explained to that the word the state department had come up with translated to "overcharged" and not "reset."
US officials have said they plan to fix the gift.
The Kremlin and the White House are trying to patch up relations that have suffered in recent years over US's support for Georgia and Ukraine's NATO membership bids, Russia's role in last year's brief war with Georgia, as well as the planned US missile shield in central Europe.
Comment: Overcharged - instead of reset - describes exactly the current relationship between the US and Russia, and we do wonder whether it was a message of sorts, rather than a mistake. We are supposed to believe that a whole State Department couldn't get the translation right?