Libyans get much of their television via satellite. It’s cheaper than the Internet — and it’s hard to block, despite the best efforts of the Libyan regime. At the top of the TV tree is the 24-hour news channel Al Jazeera Arabic.

Al Jazeera is funded by the Emir of Qatar. Still, most Arabs consider the channel a source of credible journalism. So said Joe Khalil, co-author of the book, “Arab Television Industries.”

“I don’t think audiences in Libya or anywhere else ignore the fact that Al Jazeera is based in Qatar and has this type of link,” he said.

But at the same time it looks at the types of stories that it’s producing in comparison with the kinds of stories that are available to them on their local media scene.

Libya’s local media scene is dominated by the state broadcaster, Jamahiriya. There are actually about a half-dozen state-run channels. Muammar Gaddafi’s son, Seif al-Islam launched them a few years ago.

Curbing outside media

Khalil said it was an attempt to trump any outside competition by saying ‘look at the wide range of material that’s available to you in your own dialect, with people like you.’

A promotional video for one of those channels featured a woman taking cover from a storm. Then the clouds part and she gazes up at the sun — which transforms into a station logo. The idea is that the Libyan channels were providing independent news, a ray of sunshine if you will.

But these channels were all toeing the government line, said Marwan Kraidy, an expert on Arab media at the Annenberg School for Communication.

He said that in recent days all the local channels have begun broadcasting the same message of support for the Gaddafi regime. But Kraidy added that there are signs on-screen that all is not well.

He recalled watching a very Orwellian scene of forced confessions of people who took part in the protests.

Then, he said, there was a jump cut in the video without warning, to a montage of street scenes set to patriotic music of young women waving portraits of Gaddafi.

And then equally abruptly, the video takes viewers from that to a jump cut into a talk show where the hosts and the guest are discussing the conspiracy against Libya.

Propaganda?

Compared to this kind of thing, Al Jazeera Arabic seems authoritative and credible. But Mokhtar Elareshi, a Libyan doctoral student currently based in Britain, said it’s not as simple as that.

“Many, many people in Libya believe that Al Jazeera is just propaganda,” he said.

Elareshi’s friends back home have been warning him not to take everything at face value. They told me not to believe what you see on Al Jazeera, because they are noisy and exaggerate the news.

Arab media expert Marwan Kraidy said Al Jazeera Arabic definitely played games.

You could see it very clearly if you watched it when it shifted coverage from Egypt to Bahrain. In Egypt it was very hostile to Mubarak: it allowed all the dissidents on the air, intellectuals, poets, politicians, journalists criticizing Mubarak.

As soon as it shifted to Bahrain it nearly turned into a propagandist for the regime.

Kraidy said Al Jazeera English has remained consistent in its coverage but al Jazeera Arabic has tacked with the wind. In Libya it’s back on the side of the protestors — in a big way.

Yusuf Al-Qaradawi is an influential Egyptian cleric and a regular on the channel. Al-Qaradawi did something that’s quite remarkable, said Kraidy

He issued a fatwa saying it was okay to kill Gaddafi. You know, giving a death sentence to a leader is not exactly impartial news coverage.

Still, Al Jazeera Arabic remains the go-to channel for many Libyans, especially now. And Mokhtar Elareshi understands that.

Sometimes you don’t have choice. You need to follow the news.

The French of Gréco (pictured) is moody and melodramatic, as befits this veteran chanteuse. Her pitch swoops to low octave depths and her Rs rrrrroll, as she sings of love, betrayal and Paris. The songs sound like personal confessions, but most are not: she became famous by singing the poems and lyrics of Raymond Queneau, Jacques Prévert and others. Now in her 80s, Gréco is bringing her über-Frenchness to a London stage.

Anna Sam records the mendacious and the mundane that she overhears at the supermarket checkout.

Sam recently retired after eight years working as a hôtesse de caisse (cash till hostess) — that was her official title. Less officially, she was a beepeuse (a woman who beeps). She was doing it to bankroll her university degree in French literature — not that the customers knew, or would have cared.

Anna Sam overhead humanity at its meanest and most idiotic. Couples surreptitiously kissing in the frozen food section, or having sex next to the detergents. People so umbilically attached to their mobile phones that that they didn’t stop to say “please” or “thank you.” Mothers telling their children: “If you don’t work hard at school, you’ll end up a like that lady behind the counter.” And when she clocked off and went home, Sam couldn’t stop hearing the beep…beep…beep of the scanner. She recorded her observations in a blog, which became a book, Les Tribulations d’une Caissière (translated into several languages including English). Her fame may yet spread, with talk of a movie.

Also in the pod, the UN Security Council resolution that got lost in translation. Resolution 242. is one of the Security Council’s most famous documents, the so-called land-for-peace concept in the Middle East. The French and English versions don’t quite say the same thing. The result? Confusion and conflict, with no end in sight. Not a good advertisement for translation or multilingualism.

And to round things off, we hear from the founders of Meena, an Arabic-English bilingual poetry journal, out of the U.S. port of New Orleans and the Egyptian port of Alexandria. (Meena means port of entry). Arabic never did sound so sweet.

Download MP3

Liberian English and its cousin Liberian Kreyol are littered with pithy sayings. Most of them, though, are as incomprehensible as badly translated Chinese fortunes. For example: Your child cannot poo poo on your lap, and you cut your legs off, you just have to clean them off. Or: If one keeps pressing a young bird in his palms, the bird may one day stooled in his hands. So, on the face of it, lots of toilet humor. But the meanings of many of these sayings aren’t intended to be funny. Several include refererences to Liberia’s civil war and refugee camps. Jason’s report centers around the night when he and his fellow Jason — with plenty of help from local experts — picked the best proverb.

Is this script a language? Yes and no. The writing system is Arabic. But the language isn’t. In this case, it’s Mandinka, one of many African languages that often use Arabic script. In fact, these languages have borrowed Arabic script for more than a thousand years. What’s interesting though, is that Ajami has been overlooked by most historians; African history has been told through the lens of English, French or Arabic documents. Also, because Ajami isn’t a language, Africans who used it were often classified as illiterate, even though they were quite capable of writing sentences of Mandinka or Hausa or Wolof. Now Ajami is getting a bit more respect, thanks to people like Fallou Ngom of Boston University and Dmitry Bondarev of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Every year, 4,000 staffers at the United Nations in New York sign up for language classes. There, they learn not just how to say things in other languages but how to say them diplomatically. Which can mean being clear, or being extremely unclear, depending on what’s required. That takes practise, as does learning how to interrupt and assert yourself without being rude. Most of us have trouble with that in our mother tongues.
Download MP3

Next in the pod is an interview with Seattle-area rabbi Mark Glickman (pictured, looking at the camera). He recently visited the Cairo Genizah, which once boasted one of Judaism’s largest repositories of documents. Many of these documents dated back hundreds of years, but at the Cairo Genizah, they were, in Rabbi Glickman’s words, “a messy, jumbled dump.” They are now stored, in somewhat better shape, in archives around the world — in the UK, the US and Israel. Glickman explains why so many sacred Jewish texts were written in Arabic.

Next, a report from Syria on book-publishing and reading in Arabic-speaking world. Books in Arabic have a long history (pictured is an Arabic version of One Thousand and One Nights from the 14th Century). But not many people these days read books in Arabic: a recent UN survey reported that less than 2% of native Arabic speakers reads even one book a year. That means that fewer books are being published. However, you can still find bookstores in cities like Damascus and Beirut; they’re trying mightily to revive the practice of reading in Arabic.

A short plug here for Ed Park’s novel, Personal Days. The book is replete with inventive wordplay (unwanted backrub given by a character named Jack = jackrub; character called Graham with whiny British accent is renamed Grime). Plus, there’s a nice un-Eating Sideways moment. It’s when the narrator suggests that there should be a French expression, along the lines of l’esprit d’escalier, for the sensation of being initially amused but later unnerved by something that’s said to you.

Finally, we visit the New York Public Library for a smell test. What does a book’s particular odor convey to an educated nose, such as that of Shelley Smith (pictured) of the library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division?
Download MP3

Also in this week’s podcast, I speak with author Katherine Russell Rich on learning Hindi at a language school in Rajasthan. Her book “Dreaming in Hindi“ is also an investigation into what happens to our brains when we learn a learn a language. Rich quizzed several neurolinguists, so she could get a handle on the challenges and all-round weird linguistic moments she encountered in her pursuit of Hindi mastery. So there are answers (not THE answers perhaps) to the following: what’s the difference between learning a language “intuitively” as a child and in a classroom setting later on? Why is it so difficult to have a perfect accent in your second or third language? Why do so many people verbally shut down for weeks or months when learning a language? How does language effect personality and vice versa? And is there blowback from your learned language that changes how you speak your native tongue?

On the subject of the last question, check out this fascinating conversation on The World’s science podcast on the latest research into what happens to your native tongue when you learn a second one. According to this study, you’ll never read your first language in the same way. Also, that cognates can trip you up.

Finally, we cast a somewhat shameful eye over a tough-to-translate expression in Spanish.

First, a couple of Paris high schools have started teaching Antillean creole, a language in the French overseas departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique.

Those two islands were in the news earlier this year after a series of strikes and protests. Then, part two of my conversation with American Laurel Zuckerman who wanted to teach high school English. Zuckerman fought the French education establishment- and guess who won? We then consider an Arabic word beloved by Saudi Arabia’s morality police. Finally, Spain unites over a soccer victory, but remains divided over which songs best represent the spirit of the nation.

Listen in iTunes or here .