BOB GARFIELD: From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. On Monday, the New York Times ran a couple of photos alongside its story on the Iran-Mexico World Cup match. In one of them, a protestor held up a sign that read, "Israel is on the map to stay." It was an obvious reference to Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's infamous remark at an anti-Zionist conference last October that Israel, quote, "should be wiped off the map." That utterance, since quoted in the media thousands of times, has been read as an ominous portent of Iran's nuclear aspirations. But is that, in fact, what he said? A debate over the translation was sparked by an e-mail made public by University of Michigan professor and Middle East specialist Juan Cole. The New York Times, which first ran the quote in a story by reporter Nazila Fathi, examined the dispute. Actually, deputy foreign editor Ethan Bronner examined it, and his findings were published in last Sunday's paper.

ETHAN BRONNER: We have, in recent weeks, been receiving a number of e-mails complaining that we had mistranslated the speech. The truth is that I started out thinking that we might have a correction, we might have some kind of clarification. We should find out if, in fact, we mistranslated it. And I was preparing simply an internal document. And then, having gone through it over a period of days, we decided that it was worth sharing with all of our readers.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Probably a lot of the critical letter writers were deriving their information from Juan Cole, a history professor in Michigan who authors a widely-read blog about Middle East politics and history. Now, Cole has argued that the idiom, "wipe off the map," doesn't even exist in Persian, and that in that speech, Ahmadinejad was actually citing a remark by Ayatollah Khomeini years ago, and that Ayatollah Khomeini's remark was, "This regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."

ETHAN BRONNER: It turned out that Khomeini's original phrase was so metaphorical and abstract that, at the time, translators didn't know what to do with it and ended up calling it "map," and it ended up staying in the kind of Iranian lexicon that way. And at military parades in Tehran across all these 28 years or so since the revolution, death to Israel, death to America, wipe both off the map, are pretty common things. So, in brief, what happened is that I asked Nazila to go back to the original Khomeini quote. And what she found was that Ahmadinejad had, in fact, slightly misquoted Khomeini and had used a slightly different phrase so that the word "map" seemed better translated in Ahmadinejad's words as "time" or "pages of time." But one of the central points that Juan Cole was making was that the word "wipe," or "wipe off" or "wipe away," was an aggressive word, and that really "disappear" is a better translation of the Persian both by Khomeini and by Ahmadinejad.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Have any officials in Iran, to your knowledge, actually disputed the "map-wiping" [CHUCKLING] translation of Ahmadinejad's remark?

ETHAN BRONNER: No, I mean, to the contrary. In fact, the president's official website, if you go to it in English, it uses the term "wipe away" and "wipe off." And when the foreign minister was questioned about this in Brussels months after the speech, he didn't dispute the translation. He simply said, look, we're not talking about, you know, going to war. Anyway, you can't wipe a country off the map. It's just a question of objecting to and opposing this particular state and country in the Middle East.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So you can oppose the existence of a country, but that doesn't necessarily imply that you're ready to destroy it.

ETHAN BRONNER: Well, this is exactly the issue, Brooke. I think that a simple analogy might be that if I said to you, I wish you were dead, it's not the same thing as my saying to you, I am going to kill you. There was a similar dispute in the beginning of the Cold War when Khrushchev said, "We will bury you." Now, I'm not saying that it was mistranslated, but there were those who argued that the Russian, in fact, was closer to "I will attend your funeral" or "I will be there at your burial," and that it wasn't quite the attack that it seemed to be to Americans at the time.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: So, after your examination, you stand by the translation.

ETHAN BRONNER: Yes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But do you think it's okay for this phrase to become a shorthand to describe Ahmadinejad and what he stands for in the media?

ETHAN BRONNER: Well, in the case of Ahmadinejad, I don't think that it's an inappropriate stand-in for his general set of remarks or Iran's policy toward Israel. It does support, both with money and arms, Islamic Jihad in Palestine as well as Hizbullah in Lebanon. Both are groups that have engaged in terrorist attacks against Israelis. And he has, of course, equally famously, continued to question the reality of the Holocaust, and so, you know, he does not speak in isolation. I mean, obviously there's another point here, which is that the reason this feels so fresh and so raw as an issue is that there are those who argue that we misinterpreted Iraq's intentions or plans before going to war with Iraq. I'm not making that argument. I'm just simply saying that there are those who've argued it, and they want to draw an analogy to what's going on with Iran. And it seems to me whatever argument you want to make, you need to know the facts. And so I looked into the facts, and these are as I see them with regard to his words.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: All right. Ethan, thank you very much.

ETHAN BRONNER: My pleasure, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Ethan Bronner is deputy foreign editor of The New York Times.