Girwen’s Weblog

What Ahmadinejad really said – breaking apart any justification to attack Iran.
For your benefit, I will translate the quote from the original Farsi into English, word for word. In a phonetic of the Farsi: “Een rejim-eh
isghalghar-eh qods bayad az safheh-ye ruzegar mahv shavad.”

1st word – “Een”: this
2nd word – “rejim-eh”: regime
3rd word – “isghalghar-eh”: occupying
4th word – “qods”: Jerusalem
5th word – “bayad”: must
6th word – “az”: from
7th word prefix – “safheh”: page (does not mean map; never did)
8th word suffix – “ye”: of
9th word: “ruzegar”: time (does not mean anything else)
10th word: “mahv”: disappear (we can loosely translate this as wipe)
11th word: “shavad”: should

Now, to “un-yoda” this translation:

“This regime occupying Jerusalem must disappear from the page of time.”
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Digg friends, please note that the above words do not have synonyms, or else those synonyms would be listed as I am an objective person with a strong distaste for Iran’s current government. Pay attention to these critical words:
(1) the 2nd word, “rejim-eh”, cannot mean anything but “regime” (the word was, literally, adopted from the French).
(2) the 7th word, “safheh”, does not mean anything but “page” or “paper”. You cannot use it to mean “map” in any context.
(3) the 9th word, “ruzegar”, means “time” or “period of time”, and nothing else.

Further, there is no Persian idiom for “wiping off the map” as there is in English.

Background:
I am an American-Iranian (and I say American first because my family fled Iran after the 1979 revolution for their lives) and take pride in speaking fluent Farsi at an academic level. I am completely against the regime in Iran, but a fervent believer of the profound need for truth. I was shocked when I saw the original Farsi mistranslated so erroneously that it was tantamount to someone’s malicious doing (propaganda for war). The person responsible for the mistaken translation is Nazin Falthi of the New York Times. I urge everyone to send letters to the editor, and you may include the above text, to make sure that they take out a conspicuous, full, front-page retraction and correct this error that has shaped US and EU policy.

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