EA WorldView

In Thursday's Live Coverage, we noted Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi's speech at the Non-Aligned Movement's summit in Tehran, supporting opposition to the "oppressive regime" in Syria and surprising his Iranian hosts:

Morsi pays tribute to the 'revolution of Syria while Iran President Ahmadinejad sits stonefaced....Another barbed moment in Egyptian President Morsi's speech, "The bloodshed in Syria hangs upon all of us, it will not stop if we don't act."

Some of the impact may have been lost through mis-translation, whether this was unintentional --- "At their moment of glory Iran government can't get their translation in order, even Ahmadinejad complaining" --- or deliberate....

We have already noted that Iranian media have censored Egyptian President Morsi's remarks on Syria (see 1520 GMT). Now it appears that outlets are re-writing the speech....

Khabar Online claims that Morsi issued a warning of "sedition" against the Syrian people and said all should hope that the "popular" regime remains in power.

There is also scepticism over the headline of Fars that Morsi, soon after his provocative statement at the Non-Aligned Movement's summit criticising "bloodshed" in Syria and supporting the opposition to the "oppressive" regime, "Egypt Thinks of Iran as a Strategic Partner".

We then reported on Friday, from a French journalist, that Iranian State TV had altered Morsi's criticism of the regime by changing "Syria" to "Bahrain".

Head of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), Ezzatollah Zarghami, has accepted a mistake in the translation of the Egyptian president’s address to the 16th Summit of the Non Aligned Movement (NAM) in Tehran.

“The shortcoming was only in the one case of translating the name for Syria into Bahrain in one of the [IRIB] television channels,” Zarghami said on Sunday. He added that, while Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi was addressing the summit, a technical mistake occurred during the IRIB Channel 1’s live broadcast of the speech and therefore another translator was replaced, who made the mistake, Mehr news agency reported.

However, Western media were soon to seize upon the error, the IRIB chief complained. He noted, “The Islamic Republic of Iran News Network (IRINN) bore the main responsibility for the broadcast of the summit’s proceedings,” adding that the channel’s coverage of the summit was broadcast “both at home and abroad free of any [such] mistranslations.”

Zarghami stressed that “Iran’s media coverage [of the event] was so broad and perfect” that the Western media’s attempts to abuse the shortcoming was to no avail.

On August 30, in his much-awaited address to the summit, the newly-elected Egyptian president said that those who are struggling for freedom are the “Palestinians and Syrians.” However, his speech was mistranslated by mistake when the interpreter said “Palestinians and Bahrainis".

On Saturday, a statement by Bahrain's government said Manama had filed a formal complaint against Iran over the mistake.