edit conflict I am very exasperated by the rant above I have really tried to respond to all of your points Jugi but I don t think you will be satisfied by any reply other than complete agreement I am sorry if I accused you of anything you have not done I apologize Let s go back to your sentence about the accuracy of MEMRI s translations I asked you to reproduce your refs on the talk page for the sake of clarity of discussion but instead of helping me out by doing that you spend screen after screen berating me for not answering you OK here they are a b Mayor of London Press Release a b c d Yigal Carmon Osama Bin Laden Tape Threatens U S States memri org 1 November 2004 a b Ramona Smith Did Osama send election threat Philadelphia Daily News 2 November 2004 Carmon Whitaker email debate OK Let s discuss these refs Livingston press release is unacceptable as a RS on this Livingston does not have any translation expertise in Arabic He is therefore not an acceptable cite on the accuracy of translation You are using CArmon s own translation to say that MEMRI s translations are inaccurate That is quite bizarre Ramona Smith I don t know what more I can sy about this She is talking about the binLaden tape I believe the only person she quote with any translation expertise is Cole Al Jazeera the most prominent Arabic news source iin the world translated the same way MEMRI did Juan Cole disputed the translation after the fact saying that binLaden was not using standard Arabic and also disputed their interpretation No one in the world excpet for binLaden knows what he meant to say in that tape This is not enough of an example to generalize from Could you consider reproducing the part of the Whitaker piece that refers to the accuracy of translation here for discussion I have read those articles a fewtimes and believe that Whitaker came up with one minor example I also note that you keep inserting a Cole quote and his blog is not an acceptable source for this article Finally You want to use headings selectivity and bias and then place quotes under one or the other that contain sentences which contain both types of crits I split up some of the quotes so that the ideas of the critics would come under the appropriate headings You object to this and say your version is more well written I disagree I m not sure what more to say about this Elizmr it does not help our conversation for you to refer to my statement to you as a rant And it does not help our conversation for you to falsely accuse me of doing things I have not done as you apologized for above NOR to falsely accuse me of NOT doing things that I HAVE done as you just did above I DID provide references to my citations above in this talk page more than a week ago but you never responded See Here I even made the links easy to use simply click on them in the text I added Elizmr lets discuss them in the order you cited The first is a Mayor of London Press Release published by the Greater London Authority City Hall and available on the london gov uk website Do you claim that this is not a RS Your objection that the Mayor of London Livingstone is not personally a certified translator is absurd this press release is available from the City Hall in Arabic and other languages so clearly he did not prepare this document personally but with the help of a staff that spoke Arabic Would you try to deny a statement by George Bush about Iran in a WP article because he is not personally trained to translate Persian Your argument is just plain silly I am using Carmon s statement to prove to you that the Cole dispute was about translation since you were questioning that above MEMRI s president makes this statement the U S media in general mistranslated the words So clearly he considered this dispute to be about TRANSLATION Ramona Smith published her article about the Cole dispute in the Philadelphia Inquirer Do you claim that this newspaper is not a RS In her article she writes That supposed warning to red states was lost in muddled American translations released with the video last week the Middle East Media Research Institute claimed But translation problems or no experts at a variety of prominent think tanks disagreed with the idea that bin Laden was preparing to sort out safe states from target states Do you see why this is clearly a dispute about MEMRI translation in a RS Whitaker and Carmon debated in a Special Report in the Guardian U