The Semafor article just reports that the Propublica story is being reviewed, with the review being later published in the editor’s note which you linked. Do you have any reputable sources that criticize Propublica’s response as being inaccurate?
That's an inaccurate summary of the Semafor article, and also omits the Fallows Substack, which is authored by a veteran reporter who interviewed a veteran translator and published his comments in full.
Both the Semafor article and the Fallows Substack report on many Chinese translators who found the translations in the ProPublica article incorrect and misleading. The ProPublica editor note engages with none of their criticisms directly, and only states that they found some translators who all declared their translation "plausible", and that some of the translators agreed with or considered acceptable some particular points of their translation. They make some corrections and acknowledgments of ambiguity and missing context, but without any meaningful discussion of the impact of these changes on the article.
Regarding that, I think it is revealing that the biggest revisions in the story, including a full new paragraph pointing out translation ambiguity with a link to the editor's note, are concentrated in the first few paragraphs of the story, where the "bombshell revelations" are typically broken.
Fallows notes that some of the most problematic aspects of the story went entirely unanswered:
> Why did you dismiss the issue of virtually identical language found in a Communist Party document many months before the alleged “lab leak”? Did this issue come up in the editing process? How was it resolved?
All this said, I agree with Fallows that ProPublica is still very much worth reading, and that it's just unfortunate they won't frankly acknowledge some shortcomings in reporting on a topic that Western sources are inevitably going to mess up. Even in this story, ProPublica deserves credit for transparency, disclosing its original sources in a way that allowed outside critics to quickly and easily reassess them.
