Linguists Crack the Case! (expanded update)

 It turns out that the reason the dam did not definitively break until Thursday  is that Diallo’s crucial convo with her henchman, in “a unique dialect of Fulani”, was not finally translated until Wednesday

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/nyregion/one-revelation-after-another-undercut-strauss-kahn-accusers-credibility.html?ref=global-home

Investigators with the Manhattan district attorney’s office learned the call had been recorded and had it translated from a “unique dialect of Fulani,” a language from the woman’s native country, Guinea.

A reader based in France comments:

Fulani is one of the three major West African languages (excluding French), not a "unique dialect." There are nearly 100,000 Fulani speakers living and around in NYC and have been for two decades. The courts know this, the police know this, the hospitals know this, and specifically because of the courts and police, all the interpreting agencies of the city have had to find interpreters for Fulani.

This sounds reasonable enough, but let us parse the newspaper’s statement more closely.  (Attention to grammar, here.)  To say that a conversation took place in “a unique dialect of Fulani” does not mean “… in Fulani, which is a unique dialect”, but rather “in a unique [they should have written: rare] dialect of the language known broadly as Fulani”.

Now, whether or not Fulani shows sharp dialectal cleavages, I do not know;  but some languages certainly do.  There are mutually unintelligible dialects of Chinese, of Arabic, and others. 

Another reader comments:

The call in Fulani should have been translated long ago: yes, but by whom? it is not so simple as it might seem to find competent translators for a little-known language. Just speaking the language (like the woman's fellow Guineans in New York) does not make a person a translator.

If you have worked as a translator, you will know the truth of this.   Additionally, a hurried jailhouse convo between close associates is likely to be much more cryptic and elliptical than what you might hear on the BBC.    It can be difficult to decipher recordings in your own native language, in such cases.

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At Le Parisien, a reader comments:

SAUVONS LA RECHERCHE! Trois mois pour traduire une conversation téléphonique!!! Elle durait combien la conversation? Elle appelait Fidel Castro? La recherche de la vérité manque cruellement de moyens. Envoyez vos dons à: Federal Bureau of Investigation 935 Pennsylvania Ave, NW Washington, DC 20535 pour que le FBI puisse se payer quelques vacations de traducteur english-peul et que l'enquête avance plus vite.

Check or money-order  gratefully accepted.  ;->

Actually, despite what this and other posters unthinkingly assume, it is unlikely that Diallo's comms were on cover.   Rather, some random jailbird got a call, which was monitored as a matter of course.  No reason to be spun up about it, and probably not in the province of the FBI.  This in itself explains why it took so long to be translated.  The local Spanish linguist listens, shakes his head, "Not a dialect I know."  The cut gets shuttled around, sent out for comment;  eventually someone really on the ball figures out it's Fulani.

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[Update 1440 AD -- from the Annals of Linguistic Sleuthing]

The most important forgery in history was the Donation of Constantine.  Supposedly written in 312 AD, it has the Emperor leaving all of Italy to the Papacy.  The document was exposed as a forgery by Lorenzo Valla in 1440, on historical and linguistic grounds.