{"id":697,"date":"2006-06-14T15:31:53","date_gmt":"2006-06-14T14:31:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2006\/06\/14\/ahmedinejad_misquoted"},"modified":"2025-10-10T20:54:46","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T19:54:46","slug":"ahmedinejad_misquoted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2006\/06\/14\/ahmedinejad_misquoted","title":{"rendered":"Ahmedinejad misquoted"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a title=\"Comment is free: Lost in translation\" href=\"http:\/\/commentisfree.guardian.co.uk\/jonathan_steele\/2006\/06\/post_155.html\">Comment is free: Lost in translation<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Jonathan Steele on how the president of Iran&#39;s notorious &quot;wipe off the map&quot; speech did not in fact contain the offending words at all:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nThe New York Times&#39;s Ethan Bronner and Nazila Fathi, one of the paper&#39;s Tehran staff, make a more serious case. They consulted several sources in Tehran. &quot;Sohrab Mahdavi, one of Iran&#39;s most prominent translators, and Siamak Namazi, managing director of a Tehran consulting firm, who is bilingual, both say &#39;wipe off&#39; or &#39;wipe away&#39; is more accurate than &#39;vanish&#39; because the Persian verb is active and transitive,&quot; Bronner writes.<br \/>\nThe New York Times goes on: &quot;The second translation issue concerns the word &#39;map&#39;. Khomeini&#39;s words were abstract: &#39;Sahneh roozgar.&#39; Sahneh means scene or stage, and roozgar means time. The phrase was widely interpreted as &#39;map&#39;, and for years, no one objected. In October, when Mr Ahmadinejad quoted Khomeini, he actually misquoted him, saying not &#39;Sahneh roozgar&#39; but &#39;Safheh roozgar&#39;, meaning pages of time or history. No one noticed the change, and news agencies used the word &#39;map&#39; again.&quot;\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Steele notes that even MEMRI, which &quot;is headed by a former Isareli military intelligence officer and has sometimes been attacked for alleged distortion of Farsi and Arabic quotations for the benefit of Israeli foreign policy&quot;, also accepted that the real speech referred to time rather than place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Comment is free: Lost in translation Jonathan Steele on how the president of Iran&#39;s notorious &quot;wipe off the map&quot; speech did not in fact contain the offending words at all: The New York Times&#39;s&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[76],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iran"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-bf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=697"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42398,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697\/revisions\/42398"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}