We Are Temporarily Adding MEMRI and Fars to the Blogroll

For much of this stuff you don't need to have translations, just observation, common sense and really fast computers. See December 19's "Why Is Defense Contractor Lockheed-Martin's Stock Trading Like There's Going to Be a War? (LMT)" which two weeks later gave us this:

FinViz

Regarding the Fars News Agency, the choice was between it and the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).
IRNA is the official news agency and delivers the government's view of things, akin to People's Daily in China. Useful but limited.  Fars has a somewhat wider range of opinion/editorial voice but can't really stray too far from the party line without repercussions.

MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute) is an Israeli translation service that has its own set of biases.
The biggest rap against them is they often choose to translate stories that put Iran in a poor light.
This used to be true of the Arab world as well but there seem to have been some political shifts where they don' highlight calls from the Saudi mosques to kill the Jews, although they still do so for Gaza.

That said, MEMRI very rarely mis-translates Farsi/Persian or Arabic, the number of instances is low enough that the same individual examples have been used by critics for years. And for video and audio rather than print there are very few other publicly available sources.

Additionally there are dozens of  individuals and groups that translate news out of Iran. If we choose to use something from one of them we name/credit them.

For more on the pros and cons of MEMRI the Wikipedia entry has some of the highlights.
For Fars, just keep in mind who they have to answer to: "Iran: Reporter Receives 40 Lashes For Fake News"