Copyright © 2007 Ali Darwish. All Rights Reserved.

TRANSLATION MONITOR

The Problem of "Re" in Abysmal Arabic Media

Was Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf elected in the first place to be re-elected this time round?

Parroting news carried by Reuters, which other western news broadcasters regurgitate, Arabic media regurgitate the regurgitated to an amazing degree of pristine stupidity, while claiming "superior" journalistic standards of objectivity, neutrality and accuracy. Of course, "before it is news, it is Reuters", and remains so at the hands of absent-minded and ignorant news editors, translators and reporters—so much so that modern history is being falsely written on television screens every day—lost in a jumble of foreign metaphors and idiomatic expressions, these media workers are unable to cope with or understand the simplest forms of language.

Of particular interest in this madness is the use and abuse of the prefix "re-" in both English sources and Arabic translations, which can give credence to a news item such as this one:

ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf will give up his post of army chief if he is re-elected president and will be sworn in for a new term as a civilian, his lawyer told the Supreme Court on Tuesday.

Was Musharraf elected in the first place to be re-elected? Musharaf came to power in what is often described as a "bloodless" military coup in 1999, ousting Nawaz Sharif, the elected prime minister and appointing himself to the office of President of Pakistan. Yet just because his lawyer tells the Pakistani Supreme Court that Musharraf will relinquish his post as army chief if he is re-elected president every news agency in the world parrots the same phrase unaltered and without reminding the audience of the very fact that Musharraf was never elected in the first place. Western media networks, especially reporters and news editors who want to "make a difference for what is good and just in the world", waste no opportunity to remind us of the abysmal state of affairs in the Arab world and the Middle East because of absence of democracy, freedom of speech and so on. Yet they absent-mindedly parrot falsehoods and pass them as facts while their Arab counterparts in complete jackassery translate them as they come. Is it the RE prefix that is causing the problem or has moronity become so endemic among those who want to make a difference?

To re-elect is to elect again, which means at some point in the past someone was elected and he or she is to be elected again. Granted that direct quotes mandate "as is" reporting of direct quotes, news reporters and editors also have a duty of care to make sure they are not reporting untruths while maintaining to be objective and unbiased.

News media networks should re-think their translation and news reporting processes before they moronically parrot what they apparently cannot understand.