In the Race
Now, here, you see, it takes all the blogging I can do to keep in the same place.
If I want to get somewhere else, I must blog twice as fast as that!
You see, I'm in
the Red Queen's Race...
Translation? $150,000
By Janet Evans
Monday, Aug 4 2008, 08:46 PM
The U.S. Army is in dire need of native Arabic translators and is willing to pay bonuses of $150,000 in hopes of keeping them. And it isn’t just a matter of knowing the language…it’s a matter of knowing the culture of the region. It’s a matter of knowing how the people think. That’s why just learning the language and becoming a translator won’t cut it.
"This is a war not only against the US, but against our way of freedom," says Sergeant Madi, a native interpreter and US citizen who asked to be identified only by his surname due to security concerns for him and his family. "We have been fighting for over 16 years against Islamic extremism. It is also my war."
The matter of trust comes into play here also. Can we totally trust the interpreter? The U.S. is using interpreters who have been rushed through the Green Card process....pushed through just so they can be used for this purpose. Can they be trusted? Who is the ultimate judge here?
“The Army has also been quietly growing its own capability to recruit and train Arab-Americans and others as American soldiers to do high-level work overseas. The Army now has more than 600 such linguists, known by their military job designation as "09 Limas." They come from places like Morocco, Egypt, and Sudan, but are recruited by the Army wherever there are large Arab-American populations, including Dearborn, Mich.; Miami; Dallas; Los Angeles; and Washington, D.C. The Defense Department is now authorized to put green-card holders on a fast track to US citizenship. The 09 Lima linguists are in so much demand that the Army is raising the number it will recruit next year, from 250 to 275. "
Then there are stories like this. The ultimate judge? Ask the commander…
"Yet when it comes to linguistic and cultural expertise, few can compare to a native speaker, defense officials say. "They hear things that are said around them, they are able to see things that others can't see," says Mr. Smith. Smith tells the story of a commander in Iraq who was using a civilian interpreter, or "terp" in the vernacular of the military, employed by a private contractor, as the American commander spoke to a local Iraqi. During the meeting, the civilian interpreted literally the words of the local Iraqi, who had told other Iraqis to feed the American commander parsley. But an 09 Lima standing nearby heard something different: feeding parsley to someone was a reference to an old expression in which parsley was fed to a bird to choke it to death. "He was pretty much giving an order to have the commander killed," says Smith. "Right there, a life was saved .... You can see just by knowing a bit of slang, being a native speaker, it can make a difference."
Read the entire article from the Christian Science Monitor
HERE
