Snapshot: Frogs at the Nataional Aquarium

Tree frog

This past Memorial Day Weekend, we took my long-time friends, who were here visiting from Amman, to Baltimore to marvel at the breathtaking sea creatures on display at the National Aquarium. While there, my super-talented husband took this phenomenal picture of this live frog chilling inside a tank at the aquarium.

In my humble, completely unbiased opinion, I think this is one of the best photos I have seen in a while. The picture is just too good to be true. The colors are so vibrant and alive and the frog just looks extremely engaged. Just look at its tiny hands! It is just perfect. Way to go hubby! Here are some more frog pictures taken by the talented Mr Tynes. [Clicking the picture links to a BIG version.]

Blue Dart frog Bullfrog Tree frog
MEMRI: Lost in translation?

MEMRI: Lost in translation?

Still from Al-Aqsa TV clipBesides writing and editing, I spend a big chunk of my day as a linguist, translating Arabic to English and vice versa. Although the process itself is tedious and hectic at times, I enjoy it for the most part, particularly when I’m trying to find the exact word match. I look at a challenging text as a riddle that can only be solved by hunting for the most accurate missing pieces. It is an elusive game but I enjoy it and better, I even get paid for it. Any translator dreads the time when they end up choosing words that do not match. It is the ultimate horror when the translator “mistranslates” especially when it comes to the business of news. Misquoting someone’s words and then broadcasting them to the public is the news translator’s ultimate bad dream. Luckily, I have yet to face my interpretation nightmare.

All that said, it should come as no surprise that I was extremely intrigued by Brian Whittaker’s piece in The Guardian that highlighted the mistranslation of the now infamous Al-Aqsa TV clip, which was eaten up by US media outlets. While I found the show and its content extremely off-putting, as children are being cajoled into parroting political ideologies, Whittaker makes a very valid point: The MEMRI translators either mistranslated or intentionally decided to embellish what was said on the tape. What was most intriguing about his piece was the argument that occurred between MEMRI’s founder and one of CNN’S Arabic speakers, Octavia Nasr.

Among those misled by Memri’s “translation” was Glenn Beck of CNN, who had planned to run it on his radio programme, until his producer told him to stop. Beck informed listeners this was because CNN’s Arabic department had found “massive problems” with it. Instead of broadcasting the tape, Beck then invited [MEMRI’s] Carmon on to the programme and gave him a platform to denounce CNN’s Arabic department, and in particular to accuse one of its staff, Octavia Nasr, of being ignorant about the language.

Carmon related a phone conversation he had had with Ms Nasr: She said the sentence where it says [in Memri’s translation] “We are going to … we will annihilate the Jews”, she said: “Well, our translators hear something else. They hear ‘The Jews are shooting at us’.” I said to her: “You know, Octavia, the order of the words as you put it is upside down. You can’t even get the order of the words right. Even someone who doesn’t know Arabic would listen to the tape and would hear the word ‘Jews’ is at the end, and also it means it is something to be done to the Jews, not by the Jews.”

And she insisted, no the word is in the beginning. I said: “Octavia, you just don’t get it. It is at the end” … She didn’t know one from two, I mean.

As a native speaker myself, I heard nothing about annihilating the Jews. What I heard was: بطخونا اليهود which translates into: “The Jews are shooting at us.” So the question becomes: Did MEMRI embellish their translation on purpose or was it simply an innocent translation mistake? I cannot say for certain. What I do know is media organizations should take MEMRI’s translation with a grain of salt, especially after this incident. Here is what Whittaker thinks:

The curious thing about all this is that Memri’s translations are usually accurate (though it is highly selective in what it chooses to translate and often removes things from their original context). When errors do occur, it’s difficult to attribute them to incompetence or accidental lapses. As in the case of the children’s TV programme, there appears to be a political motive. The effect of this is to devalue everything Memri translates — good and bad alike. Responsible news organisations can’t rely on anything it says without going back and checking its translations against the original Arabic.

Hat tip: [Jordan Journals]

The new face of Amman

Amman skyline
I was baffled when I saw this picture on Lina’s blog. The photo highlights the new face of Amman: cranes dotting the new skyline of the Jordanian capital. It took me a while to recognize that I was looking at was my beloved hometown, which I have not visited for over a year.

At first glance, I thought the picture was taken in a city in the Persian Gulf, Dubai or maybe Doha. What threw me most were the skyscrapers — a sight I always associated with busy, hectic metropolises, not my quaint Amman, the city where I was born, raised and shaped.

Here is how Roba describes the new, fast-paced change:

Amman is changing, and it’s changing fast. Nothing is ever closed on Fridays anymore, the crowd at the malls is a cosmopolitan mix of people from all over the world, and you can get really decent shopping done at City Mall. Even more decent than that in Saudi Arabia. Personally? I love it 🙂 Of course, everything has a negative side to it as well, but for now, I’m enjoying the changes.

This sudden change is mind-boggling for me at least. Have I been away that long? I wonder.

Jordanian coach starts refugee soccer team

Luma and the team
I recently read a very inspiring article about a female Jordanian female coach who started a soccer team in Georgia in 2004 for refugees in the US. Dubbed "Fugees," the soccer team’s success story grabbed global interest. According to press reports, there are plans to turn the story of her and her soccer team into a movie. Here is an excerpt from a UNHCR article:

Luma Mufleh grew up in Jordan and emigrated to the United States to attend college. In 2004, she started the Fugees, a soccer team for refugee youth in Clarkston, a small town in the southern US state of Georgia. The town has become the home of many refugees resettled there after fleeing persecution in places such as Afghanistan, Bosnia, Burundi, Congo, Gambia, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, Somalia and Sudan. Coaching for six seasons, she has brought together players from diverse backgrounds and worked to find support for her team. UNHCR’s pioneering ninemillion.org campaign, which promotes sport and education for refugee children, has been working with the Fugees for several months.

Here is another excerpt from a New York Times article.

Luma Mufleh, 31, says she was born to coach. She grew up in Amman, Jordan, in a Westernized family, and attended the American Community School, for American and European expatriates and a few well-to-do Jordanians. There, Muslim girls were free to play sports as boys did, and women were permitted to coach.

Her mentor was an American volleyball coach who demanded extreme loyalty and commitment. Ms. Mufleh picked up on a paradox. Though she claimed to dislike her coach, she wanted to play well for her. "For the majority of the time she coached me, I hated her," Ms. Mufleh said. "But she had our respect. Until then, I’d always played for me. I’d never played for a coach."

Ms. Mufleh attended college in the United States, in part because she felt women here had more opportunities. She went to Smith College, and after graduation moved to Atlanta. She soon found her first coaching job, as head of a 12-and-under girls soccer team through the local Y.M.C.A. On the field, Ms. Mufleh emulated her volleyball coach, an approach that did not always sit well with American parents. When she ordered her players to practice barefoot, to get a better feel for the soccer ball, a player’s mother objected on the grounds that her daughter could injure her toes. "This is how I run my practice," Ms. Mufleh told her. "If she’s not going to do it, she’s not going to play."

In this day and time, we need more Jordan-related stories like this and less like this one.

Can’t wait for the ‘Newseum’

Artits's interpretation of the insides of the Newseum I’m really excited about the opening of the new news museum dubbed the "Newseum" in Washington, DC in October of this year. It looks to be a top-notch museum and will focus on issues in news-making, which happens to be both my passion and my career.

Here is a brief description:

The Newseum is located at the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and Sixth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C., between the White House and the U.S. Capitol and adjacent to the Smithsonian museums on the National Mall. The 250,000squarefoot Newseum will feature seven levels of galleries and theaters that will take museum-goers behind the scenes to experience how and why news is made, and will offer them an experience that blends five centuries of news history with uptothesecond technology and handson exhibits.
Source: [Newseum website]

Among the exhibits featured in the museum will be an interactive newsroom, a great hall of news, "Today’s front pages," and a journalists’ memorial. How cool is that? I’m literally counting the days until it opens. This city gets more and more exciting by the day. I really can’t wait for this phenomenal museum to open its doors to all the news junkies out there.