> From: Sampo Syreeni [mailto:decoy@iki.fi]
> Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2001 02:50 AM
> On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, Marco Cimarosti wrote:
>
> > Alef Fatha Lam Sukun Qaf Fatha Alef Ain Kasra Dal Fatha
> Teh-Marbuta
> >(Damma)
>
> It strikes me as weird that none of the major news media have
> gone to the
> pain of finding out how the buzzwords of the day (al-Qaida
> and Osama bin
> Laden) are actually written in Arabic, properly transliterated or even
> pronounced.
I'm willing to bet that most of them have at least one person on
staff who can do exactly that - however, far too little of the audience
would be interested. When reporting foreign names, the important thing for
news media is consistency, so that the audience know that this person or
place is the same one that appeared in a previous story. The accuracy of
the translation is a secondary consideration.
I remember when the Olympics were held in Nagano, my boss of the
time, who was of distant Japanese descent, complained to me that the
American announcers were mispronouncing "Nagano" and that they should learn
to pronounce it correctly. "Absolutely," I said, "and the Japanese
announcers should be sure to pronounce 'California' correctly." He was not
amused.
I also recall when the U.S. government decided to switch from
Wade-Giles to Pinyin romanization of Chinese and muscled the media into
playing along. All that confusion, just so people could pronounce the words
a little less inaccurately...
/|/|ike
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