For example, BBC tweeted "Hundreds feared dead or injured in Israeli air strike on hospital in Gaza, Palestinian officials say", which turned out to be disinformation from Hamas (although they did attribute the claim, but still).
While it's less about Hamas, another incident that stands out was their documentary with "sanitized" translations, like replacing "jihad against the Jews" with "fighting and resisting Israeli forces".
>"jihad against the Jews" with "fighting and resisting Israeli forces"
But isn't this a fair editorial change? "Jihad" just means "fighting for a noble cause", and most Palestinians don't like to refer to the proper name "Israel" since they feel it validates the existence of that country. Thus, they tend to refer to "Israelis" by the ethnic designation that they came to be known as during the colonial era - "the Jews".
If the editor hadn't made that correction, Jewish people living in London or New York City might believe that Palestinian resistance groups intend to fight them, while the correction makes the true context much more clear?
If I didn't like to refer to the US by name because of my personal hatred for it, so I called it the Great Satan instead, would it be fair game to edit that back to "the US" in subtitles?
Arabic speakers have plenty of options for referring to Israeli forces other than "Yahud". There's the widely used Arabized transliteration of Israel, or "occupation forces", "enemy forces", etc. When someone says "Yahud", it's because they're referring to Jews, not because some limitation in their language forced them to say it.
But even if (hypothetically) language limitations plausibly forced a certain "unintended" choice of words, it's not the role of a translator to come up with a fundamentally different statement that they might have meant to say. If they were worried that a literal translation would led to confusion, they could have just omitted the quote.
It's apples and oranges to compare an externally-imposed nickname like "The Great Satan" with an ethnic designation that was the group's primary identity within the lifetimes of still-living people. There were no Israelis during the colonization of Palestine, recall. There were "the Jews", however, which is when the term entered the region's popular lexicon.
FWIW though, if there was some other group called "The Great Satan" that wasn't the US, and you were a journalist reporting on what someone had said about the US while terming then "The Great Satan", yes, you would still want to clarify that, I think?
>Arabic speakers have plenty of options for referring to Israeli forces other than "Yahud".
Don't Israelis also refer to themselves as "the Jews", though? As in, "eternal homeland of The Jews", "Netanyahu is the leader of the Jewish people", etc.? And wasn't that what most Palestinians, including Jewish ones, called the Jewish colonial population of Palestine prior to Israel's formation in 1948?
>it's not the role of a translator to come up with a fundamentally different statement that they might have meant to say.
But it isn't fundamentally different, when understood in the likely intended context. Jihad just means "fighting for a noble cause", and "the Jews" to anyone in the region clearly refers to Israelis, so there's no change in meaning, just the opposite - the chance of a drastic misunderstanding is reduced by the translation.
Israel has existed for 78 years now, and it didn't take long for us to update language, like replacing "Jewish militias" with "Israeli forces" to reflect the present reality. Such updates happened universally, across nations and languages (Arabic included).
Even political leaders who don't recognize Israel as a state still mostly refer to it by name. The few holdouts who refuse to say "Israel" are doing so out of hatred, not because 78 years wasn't enough time to work out the proper linguistic updates.
> you would still want to clarify that
Yes, but not by changing the statement and sanitizing its meaning. The usual method is to add bracketed context, like "The Great Satan [reference to the US]".
> Don't Israelis also refer to themselves as "the Jews", though? As in, "eternal homeland of The Jews", "Netanyahu is the leader of the Jewish people", etc.?
Both are in fact references to the Jews, not to Israel. The latter is just a weird metaphorical statement.
Thanks for taking the time to share your views! I don't know that we'll be able to reach much more consensus, but I appreciate hearing your perspective. Cheers!
While it's less about Hamas, another incident that stands out was their documentary with "sanitized" translations, like replacing "jihad against the Jews" with "fighting and resisting Israeli forces".