QUESTION ASKED: Did the Entire Media Industry Misquote a Hamas Spokesperson?

I clicked the “Translate post” tab, which uses Google Translate, to see what text was in the tweet. This is what it showed:

This is the moment where your eyebrows should arch. Notice that the text refers to more than 500 victims. A victim can mean a death, but it, of course, can also mean someone injured in any capacity. Had the spokesperson not said that more than 500 were killed, but merely said more than 500 were victims?

Obviously, either of these outcomes are horrific. And, as noted earlier, any number cited so early after the incident was suspect. But if a news outlet is going to report a statement by Hamas, the specifics matter a lot when a claim made about deaths, initially attributed to Israel’s actions, was shared with and influenced the reactions of tens or perhaps hundreds-of-millions of people around the world.

The word “victim” was curious, but it was also text in a tweet, not the actual interview. And it was a translation from Google. How reliable was that? I was skeptical about the tweet text’s veracity.

I didn’t want to fall prey to the same secondhand sourcing error I suspected everyone else had done. So I hired two different Arabic translators to listen to the interview, then translate it and transcribe it into English.

One of the translators seconded the use of the word “victim,” and he made it clear to me that in this context it was different from “killed.” The other translator, in referencing Al-Qidra’s comments, translated the word as “casualties.” I pressed the translator: sometimes words in one language do not have a direct translation into a different language. Was it possible that the word Al-Qidra used could be translated as “deaths”? No, she said.

Bolstering confidence in the translations is that right before the sentence in question, Al-Qidra had referred to dead bodies and casualties or victims being brought to the hospital by paramedics. He differentiated between the two. The correct translation had to be that he said more than 500 were “victims” or “casualties”—not killed.

Read the whole thing.