Interesting article here at The New Republic. Joseph Braude, the author (who sent me the link) says it “addresses an all-too-often overlooked problem in America’s “public diplomacy” efforts in the Arab Middle East.”
I don’t know enough about Arabic, and the local vernaculars, to know exactly how serious the problem is but I’ve seen the problem in English, where I have literally had to translate between two English speakers who could not understand each other – and I do mean literally – I was saying ” he said blah blah” to her and “she said blah blah” to him. And I have met English speakers who have some trouble even with BBC’s ‘middle of the Atlantic’ style of English.
If the problem in Arabic is worse, as Joseph is saying in the article, it is certainly something we need to be addressing.
