Every morning I try to translate some Arabic from BBCArabic.com, and occasionally other Arabic-language sources. This is just to keep up my knowledge that was gained so painfully. And Google Translate, which I use to check my translation, has been very useful at times because it picks out names which I hadn’t recognized as names (since Arabic has no capital letters) or will translate words that might be neologisms that aren’t in any dictionary yet. Sometimes, however, I can see that it has screwed up a translation, and occasionally I will edit the translation they have given. Still, what is remarkable is the way that it has improved down through the years.
But now someone has done a gross editing job on an inflammatory Palestinian article, presumably for the purpose of hiding its contents. See here. The author of this article, Raymond Ibrahim, said he translated this article showing that the author looked back fondly to the conquests by Muslims in the past, such as Mecca and al-Andalus (Spain), but then was challenged when someone used Google Translate on the original Arabic and nothing like that came up. Accordingly, he accused Ibrahim of being a liar. Ibrahim then used Google Translate himself, and sure enough, those names did not come up. But he insisted that his translation was correct and did a screenshot of the Arabic. And while I have no intention of spending time doing the translating, I could pick out the names of Mecca and al-Andalus in it.
So, I pasted that section into Google Translate, and sure enough, those names did not show up in the translation. I then deleted everything after the name al-Andalus, and it still came up with the screwy translation. Finally, I deleted everything before “opening of Mecca,” and finally the translation started working properly. In fact, it even came up not as “the opening” of Mecca, but as “the conquest of Mecca and the conquest of al-Andalus.”
Wow. Just wow. Have these people ever thought that maybe, just maybe, they lose credibility by doing these sorts of things?
They don't care about those with whom they lose credibility. They are pulling the wool over the eyes of the fools who go along with "the narrative." They are fabricating a story that us dissenters are simply crazy and imagining things.
Why? I suppose to get their dupes to accept a violent crackdown on dissent. The Biden* administration is already working to censor "misinformation" on health and on the election.
Posted by: Charles N. Steele | 07/16/2021 at 08:05 AM