Text 1: Reuters
A suicide car bomber killed 105 people and wounded 130 near a crowded marketplace south of Baghdad on Monday in the single bloodiest attack in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein.The bomber drove a car into a crowd of people queuing outside a government building in the town of Hilla, 100 km (62 miles) south of the capital. Many of those killed were shopping at stalls across the road.
Text 2: AFP
La voiture piégée a explosé à 7h30 au milieu d'une foule de fonctionnaires rassemblés pour des examens médicaux dans un centre de soins proche du siège de la municipalité, selon le lieutenant de police Kazem Maamouri. Les fonctionnaires, dont certains ont été licenciés après la chute du régime de Saddam Hussein en avril 2003, étaient rassemblés pour une visite médicale avant leur réintégration dans les services administratifs de la province.
The Reuters narrative is senseless catastrophy at a market, engendering empathy and projection in the reader, who presumably also goes to market, shopping for bananas and fish, not blast and fragments. It also keeps score.
The Agence France Press narrative is not senseless. A police lieutenant explains why the target came into existance (scheduled pro forma medical exams for collaborator-applicants with the American imposed regime held at clinic adjacent to the municipal building) and how the target was engaged (anti-personnel weapon in the middle of target when the targeted personnel were most concentrated).
So, 250 shoppers, mostly women, half of whom died, between fresh fruit and fresh fish, or 250 collaborators, mostly men, half of whom died, before paychecks printed in Washington. I'm going with the narrative of Police Lieutenant Kazem Maamouri. He knows his side just lost 250 effectives, and may have lost many more.
Posted by EBW at February 28, 2005 07:35 AM | TrackBackPlease post a direct translation of the French for those of us closer to Bush in language skills than to Kerry..
[but bush is french speaking. oh, wait a minute. that was in guy noire skit on garrison keeler's show over the weekend. sorry. google has a nice machine translation service (free). its your friend. ebw]
Posted by: Stuart at February 28, 2005 10:21 AMTry babelfish and you get this:
The booby-trapped car exploded with 7h30 in the medium of a crowd of civils servant gathered for medical examinations in a center of care close to the seat of the municipality, according to the lieutenant of police force Kazem Maamouri. The civils servant, of which some were laid off after the fall of the mode of Saddam Hussein in April 2003, were gathered for a medical examination before their rehabilitation in the administrative services of the province.
[the problem with this approach is that it is only the text i provided, and some context is in the surrounding material that i didn't provide, but which may have formed how i presented the text. the same applies to the reuters text as well. further, literal translation misses nuance and deliberate usage. then there are the errors.
finally, translation from french to english is the reader's burden. there are bloggers who don't write/cite/read french. i'm not one of them. ditto when i write in Abenaki or Siksika or anything else. ebw]
Posted by: altavista at February 28, 2005 12:53 PMWhen a blogger/reporter gives opinions and states their basic conclusions about an article, it is not too much to ask that they post the article in English to their majority English-only audience. What are we supposed to do with an article that we can't read? Sloppy internet translations are nearly useless. Please, either have the article translated properly by someone who is capable of doing that, or If you can't do that then don't post the article expecting educated replies from the English speaking readers.
Kitt
It's a Romance language, which happens to be the most mixed up branch of that language family in English, plus it is routinely studied in high school and a short passage of non-technical terms. The machine translations are good enough for the sense of the article, so EBW is doing fine with posting as is.
I wonder how much of a deterrant effect attacks like these have on new recruits versus the cost of the government finding new (replacement) recruits for the lost recruits.
Posted by: fester at February 28, 2005 04:40 PMPlease, either have the article translated properly by someone who is capable of doing that, or If you can't do that then don't post the article expecting educated replies from the English speaking readers.
Kitt,
There's a thing in Indian Lit. We can tell if something is written for us, or if it is written for non-Indians. Usually it is the exegis, the translation, the parts one should already own, or work for, for love.
That is why I won't translate automatically. I won't write for export. There are lots of other blogs that are English-only.
Posted by: Eric at February 28, 2005 06:23 PMYou fail to provide the entire narratives. Reuters says that the car has been targeting a group of waiting civil servants, and AFP mentions people going to the marketplace. The difference between the 2 texts is not that clear, even if AFP tends to give more detail on the reason why people are queueing.
The fact seems to be between your 2 versions of the story? The car targeted the queue, but there were so many people in this market area that not only the 'collaborators' were killed.
Anyway, in both cases, it is a terrific crime.
[it is only a "crime" if it isn't a legitimate military operation. i'm not in a position to determine that the insurgency is "illegal" and its use of force is "criminal", though the occupation authority (the bush regime and its clients) have made that claim since march 2003.
the point of text comparison isn't that one mentions a combatant (police/army recruit) or apparatchik (clerk/officer/judge), and one mentions a non-combatant (shopper/vendor), but how each frames the narrative. ebw]
Posted by: versac at March 1, 2005 04:23 AM