I still don't see how this changes the level of concern much, and in particular the 5th question's responses are more consistent with the gloomier interpretation, and I don't think the translation ambiguity matters here, unfortunately.
This issue also shows up when doing surveys to compare support for things across countries.
Here, for example, is a typical example one might find on social media where the connotation of the question might vary wildly depending on the language it's translated to. Reasoning about modest differences in percentage between countries then becomes rather meaningless.
Pew recently commissioned Gallup to run a poll in Israel on attitudes to social media censorship. They found high support for banning various kinds of speech:
The fourth question, especially, is disturbing: 59% want to ban publicly expressing sympathy for civilians in Gaza? Since the polling was conducted in Hebrew and Arabic, however, this got me wondering whether translation might be contributing. I went to check, and Pew did publish the questions:
A friend of a friend, Robert Herr, guessed they might have used סימפטיה ("simpatia"):
I don't speak Hebrew (or German) so I checked with Claude:
While it's great that they do publish the original English, without also publishing the actual questions they asked the results are much less useful than they could be. If it turns out they used הזדהות עם then I'm much more concerned than if they used סימפטיה, though support for censorship is worrying regardless.
So: if you're polling people in another language, please publish the translations you used!
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