You’d think the CIA were presenting ironclad evidence after receiving reports of interviews with an English-speaking Iraqi defector who claimed to be able to provide first-hand information on mobile biological weapons labs? You’d be wrong. Not if the interviews were conducted in English and Arabic by German intelligence officers, translated into German, and finally “translated back” into English. Here’s the original article from HustonChronicle.com.
Via Blogalization, who neglect to tell us which kind of Arabic, though.
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Technorati (tags): language
Argh! Thanks much for the linkback. I don’t know what kind of Arabic, though. I’m just a dumb blogger, I don’t know anything except what I read in other blogs! :-) I would assume it would be whatever Arabic dialect the defector spoke. Iraqis, like Egyptians, tend to be very proud of their version of Arabic, much the same way the Brits look down on us Yanks (or the Academie Francaise on Haitian kreol). Urbane Baghdadis speak differently from redneck Marsh Arabs, but everybody understands the fushah of al-Jazeera: it’s the language of TV.
Oh, it wasn’t meant as criticism, just as an oblique reference that people outside the Arabic-speaking world start realizing that there’s more than one Arabic language. See, eg, here. Not that I knew one variety from the other!