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Thursday December 13 5:54 PM ET
By DARLENE SUPERVILLE, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - The two translators hired to turn Osama bin Laden's spoken Arabic into understandable English disagreed at times over what he and his associates were saying.
That explains why a transcript of the videotaped conversation, broadcast around the world Thursday, is punctuated throughout with the word ``inaudible,'' said translator George Michael.
Michael said he prepared his own transcript, from Arabic to English. His collaborator, Kassem Wahba, coordinator of the Arabic language program at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, prepared another transcript, from spoken Arabic to written Arabic.
The two transcripts were then compared.
``There were inconsistencies,'' Michael, who works for Diplomatic Language Services Inc., said in an interview. ``Of course, we had to go back and forth and back and forth with the tape.''
When they disagreed over what bin Laden, suspected of plotting the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, or his companions had said, ``we would say, 'inaudible,' even if we were 50-60 percent sure,'' said Michael.
After completing their transcript, they found it matched up with the government's initial version.
``The thing here is that we both tried to be as accurate as humanly possible,'' said Michael, who is Egyptian and speaks Arabic. ``So if there is any doubt ... we decided to say it's inaudible.''
Wahba, also an Egyptian and Arabic speaker, declined to be interviewed.
Reviewing the amateurish, hourlong video in workspace at the Pentagon and under orders to complete the transcription in 40 hours, Michael said he and Wahba finished the job Wednesday night, in 12 hours.
But one translator not involved in the project suggested that wasn't enough time for proper translation.
``It would be so difficult to transcribe,'' said Akram Elias, of the Capital Communications Group, which translated previously released, professional-quality tapes of bin Laden for news organizations.
He said the government should release the Arabic transcript.
``There's no way on earth that someone watching that tape and looking at English subtitles could say this matches or doesn't because you need the Arabic transcript,'' Elias said. ``Only with the transcript can you make a judgment. No one in his right mind could judge just from hearing.''
One word that wasn't translated into English is 'fiqh,' which means jurisprudence or law.
Mordechai Kedar, a lecturer in the Arabic department at Bar Ilan University in Israel, who watched the bin Laden tape with great interest on Israeli TV, said he didn't understand why that word wasn't put into English.
``It's not unique, like other Islamic terms that are difficult to explain,'' he said.
Elias, on the other hand, said 'fiqh' was probably left alone in the transcript because the word has to do with religious jurisprudence and could be subject to interpretation.
Kedar noted the complexity of Arabic, which has several dialects.
``It has many layers, the layer of what you say and what you mean and what you allude to, and they (Arabic speakers) really play between those layers,'' Kedar said
The language gets even more complicated when speakers stray into religion.
``You have to be careful when talking about religious references, you have to put them in the right context,'' added Elias. ``It must happen word by word in order to understand the context.''
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