Syria Emerges as Victim of Overly Eager Translator

UNITED NATIONS — Where is Nicole Kidman when the United Nations really needs her? As an idealistic fictional character in Sydney Pollack's "The Interpreter," Ms. Kidman worked hard to avert an African war while meticulously carrying out simultaneous translations at the world body.

Taking creative license with the words of a Syrian diplomat, a real-world U.N. interpreter startled nervous Middle East diplomats on Tuesday by claiming that Israel had targeted a Syrian nuclear facility last month. The translation later proved to be erroneous, and Syria has emerged as the victim of an overly eager translator who apparently embellished on Damascus's complaints about perceived Israeli wrongdoing.

Diplomats who were listening to the English interpretation during routine U.N. discussions at the U.N. General Assembly body charged with disarmament and international security, known as the First Committee, were shocked to hear the would-be admission by Bassam Sabbal, the Syrian diplomat.

Speaking in Arabic, Mr. Sabbal attempted to portray Syria's southern neighbor as an aggressive weapons-trafficker. In the words of the interpreter, whose name was not released by the United Nations yesterday, Mr. Sabbal said Israel had "taken action against nuclear facilities, including the July 6 attack in Syria." The English translation was repeated in a written summary of the First Committee's discussion, which was released yesterday morning by the U.N. Department of Public Information.

To date, Syrian officials, from President Assad on down, have fiercely denied numerous press reports that Israel attacked a northern Syrian nuclear facility on September 6. In a BBC interview last month, Mr. Assad said the Israelis had hit a disused military facility. Israeli officials, meanwhile, have been uncharacteristically tight-lipped over the incident. "No comment," the deputy Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Daniel Carmon, said yesterday.

Other Western diplomats who were present at the discussion Tuesday but spoke on condition of anonymity said they were shocked to hear an official Syrian admission that Israel struck a "nuclear facility" — even if the date was incorrect.

The Israeli press, which has been prevented by government censors from reporting on the military strike other than in quotes from foreign sources, seized on the incident, as well. According to the mass-circulation newspaper Yediot Achronot, Israeli diplomats in the room immediately reported the Syrian diplomat's comment to the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. Syrian diplomats dismissed the Israeli press reports as "Zionist propaganda."

Arabic-speaking diplomats who were not present speculated yesterday that the discrepancy between the Syrian denial and the interpreter's translation could have resulted from a misunderstanding. The Arabic word for July is "Tamuz," which also happens to be the name of the Osirak nuclear facility, which Israeli jets struck in 1981. Could the diplomat's reference to an Iraqi nuclear facility have been incorrectly translated as a month?

"This is a huge manipulation of the whole issue," the Syrian ambassador to the United Nations, Bashar Jaafari, told the Sun. His colleague, he said, "Did not make any reference to what was reported later by the news." Syria has demanded a "full investigation" of the incident, he said.

A translation of Mr. Sabbal's comment, released by the United Nations late yesterday afternoon and confirmed by the Sun, corroborates Mr. Jaafari's version of events. Israel, Mr. Sabbal said in the original Arabic, "carries out military aggression" against its neighbors, as in "what happened on the September, 6, 2007, against my country." He mentioned neither a nuclear facility nor July.

"An investigation should indeed be launched," a DPI official at the United Nations, Ahmed Fawzi, said, adding that the interpreter could be "reprimanded."