TRANSLATION PROBLEMS SERVE AMERICA POORLY ABROAD, ESPECIALLY in WAR ZONES—WHY ISN’T the GOVERNMENT PUMPING BILLIONS into TRAINING AMERICANS to SPEAK,
TRANSLATION PROBLEMS SERVE AMERICA POORLY ABROAD, ESPECIALLY in WAR ZONES—WHY ISN’T the GOVERNMENT PUMPING BILLIONS into TRAINING AMERICANS to SPEAK, READ AND TRANSLATE FOREIGN LANGUAGES, instead?
By Kevin Stoda, American teaching in Kuwait
I have been certified in teaching English, Spanish and German for nearly two decades. In the interim, I have taught foreign languages in Germany, Japan, Nicaragua, Mexico, the Unite Arab Emirates, and Kuwait. I have also worked in or volunteered in Honduras, Spain and Costa Rica. However, my original field of teacher training was history and the social sciences.
Meanwhile, I have also observed over the past three decades that America continues to be way behind the curve in terms of “global intelligence’.
By using the phrase “global intelligence”, I am not just implying CIA-style or military intelligence. I am referring to all the range of common-sense-, geographic-, person-to-person-, and emotional intelligences which enable one to communicate well orally or in writing. Moreover, I am referring to the cultural, social, political, anthropologic, and ethnic intelligences needed to compete fairly and properly in a global market place, such as in China today.
Having spent a great portion of my adult life as an American ambassador abroad, I have often taken time to learn as much as I could about the language and culture where I have been working in. Therefore, I have some competence in reading Arabic and in speaking Japanese as well.
Believe me! Even if immersed in a different culture most of one’s working day, one still has to work hard to acquire those linguistic and socio-cultural intelligences mentioned above.
However, American government officials, generals, and leaders in the American economy have never applied the time and resources necessary to acquire language competencies at an acceptable level—at least not since WWII.
Moreover, there has been a common belief that buying or hiring the right people who do have such competence, any company or military can function well in a foreign land.
Mistakenly, it is also commonly believed that by hiring those people with both some language skills and personal connections along the way, any company or army can overcome all the most important obstacles and language-cultural deficits.
A CULTURE OF EXCESS AND LOW LEVEL ACHIEVEMENT
According to CorpWatch Managing Editor, Pratap Chatterjee, who was embedded recently with U.S. troops in Iraq, “Remember, out of the 160,000 troops, we had 100,000 stay on the bases. And they are really not—we talked to a soldier, and we said, ‘Well, what do you—how do you communicate with Iraqis?’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, the Iraqis on the base, they’re pretty happy.’ And I’m like, ‘But there aren’t any Iraqis on the base. The people you’re meeting on the base are Indian.’ And this food is provided, you know, to the troops by Indian workers who are paid, if they’re cleaners, $9 a day; if they’re cooks, $20 a day; if you’re a cashier, $30 a day. And it’s driven in by Fijian truck drivers. And I spent some time hanging out with Fijian truck drivers in Kuwait. These guys have driven a hundred trips to Iraq, from Kuwait City to Mosul, to Anaconda, to places around there, and they’re paid $180 a trip. So the very fact that there are beans and bullets in Iraq is a result of, you know, third world workers providing this stuff to troops.”
Only an under-competent (culturally and linguistically) military force would not know that the people around them for months at a time were speaking Hindi and other languages rather than Arabic. That is, only an under trained (in terms of language and culture group of enemy) 100,000 man force sitting on bases in Iraq could manage to state with calmness and a straight face, “Reading the media, you know, I thought this was a lot more dangerous place.”
Nonetheless, this is the kind of comment Managing Editor Chatterjee of Corp Watch reported in a recent Democracy Now interview. He adds, “And the idea really is, when soldiers are there, is they get provided with good food, as much of it as they want. They get food four times a day. They have internet. They have video games they can play. The idea is to remove them from the reality of Iraq and to make them feel at home. And we were talking to a young soldier from Mississippi, and he said, “Reading the media, you know, I thought this was a lot more dangerous place.”
Yet, that is what Chatterjees observed at times.
Moreover, Chatterjee tells us, “In 2004, there was a trucking contract with a company called PWC from Kuwait. They’re driving things into Iraq, and they have hired drivers who are not competent, who can’t drive these trucks. And the military says, ‘We’re not going to change anything. We know this was true.’ Colonel Moreland himself said, ‘There was a problem the first year.’ I said, ‘Well, why didn’t you do something about it?’ He says, ‘Because, you know, we’re at war.” I mean, this is the reality. And this is why KBR knows it can get away with workers—particularly management, with charging a lot. It really is a culture of excess.’”
One could say that the U.S. military is just doing what it does best and neglecting the rest. However, one might also say that its incompetence in the realm of foreign languages leave officers with oversight duty unable to do their duties effectively once they leave the U.S. for foreign soil.
WHY IS THERE NOT BETTER OVERSIGHT OR SERVICE?
The American Spirit of we-can-do-it is a wash-out in Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and elsewhere where international corporations pick off billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money due to the military’s lack of in intelligience in language and cross-cultural skills. This is why there is a plethora of incapacities to do proper and fair accounting of what things are costing us all in this War on Terrorism.
Moreover, according to Chatterjee’s research involving U.S. military brass in Iraq and Kuwait, historically speaking, in times of war, the U.S. military is typically not interested in holding the reigns on corruption and bad policy or procedures as long as things work—i.e. if the system isn’t 100% broke, don’t fix it.
Why not take this attitude when more and more money floods your weight despite linguistic and intelligence capabilities to see that money and resources are used efficiently?
Chatterjee doesn’t mention that one half of the problem with the USA in the Middle East these days is that without proper people in place translating the goings-on around them to every single general and corporal, most American personnel in key positions to improve the status quo will not know what is going wrong until something hits them in the face.
Meanwhile, according to Chatterjee, the U.S. military and the U.S. government outsource so much intelligence gathering it is dangerous.
In other words, bad intelligence leads to people (of the wrong people) getting killed.
Simply put--bad translations and signage communications can do the same thing.
I recall that the U.S. military was until recently shooting on site anyone getting near certain convoy trucks in Iraq, i.e. as the convoys were driving between Kuwait and Iraq. The signs posted on the tractor trailers told drivers to keep more than a couple hundred meters away--but the sign could only be read from less than a hundred meters away—and only if one knew exactly where the sign was posted on the vehicle.
Meanwhile the U.S. military depends on a third world force of hundreds of thousands to get supplies back and forth between Kuwait and Iraq each day. They are paid at a fraction of the cost that Americans would be paid in similar positions.
NOTE: I have written elsewhere of planeloads of Fijians who were told to there surprise on their arrival to work that they would not begin working in a warehouse in Kuwait as they had signed up in Fiji to do. The KBR subcontractor, PWC (Agility)of Kuwait, demanded that they needed to learn to drive long distance trucks because they would be going to Iraq on a daily basis.
How much long distance trucking goes on in the Fiji Islands, guys? Moreover, how much Arabic is learned out in Fiji?
In short, by hiring people from all over the third world, the Pentagon and the U.S. military industrial complex has been able to hide behind great mountains of mismanagement & fraud--and still make a huge profit.
Why and How?
This is naturally, partially because Americans both can’t and don’t monitor military expenditures very well in Arabic and in other languages. Also, it is because wars are big parties of excess--or at least need to be engineered to seem like parties so as to keep those wars going for very long. Fexample, in describing the “culture of excess”, Chatterjee noted, “ It’s different from what I thought. Basically, the idea of the military here [in Iraq and Kuwait] is to provide as much as possible to the troops so that they have sort of a hometown experience. We’re talking about Southern comfort food. You have some menus here, you know, an Easter menu, an Indian night menu. You know, soldiers are provided with, you know, bacon, pork loin, jellybeans, waffle bars.”
I don’t overdue it soldiers—American soldiers—are dying everyday in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. However, the entire process has been rife incompetence, misleading management, fraud, and marked by gluttonous habits of corporate America and of neighboring regional firms. All this sometimes makes me most ill.
By the way, I am not alone in this.
I interviewed Arab speaking accountant, with U.S. citizenship, recently. He works at local military bases in Kuwait and he concurred that he and other accountants are also made ill by all the fraud and waste they have witnessed over the past half decade.
TRANSLATORS INC.
Chatterjee has written elsewhere about the waste in spending carried out by the logistics arms of outsourced military contracting.
For example, he recently shared that the Manhattan- and San Diego based “L-3/Titan is now probably the second largest employer in Iraq (after Kellogg, Brown & Root, a former Halliburton subsidiary) with almost 7,000 translators and more than 300 intelligence specialists. . . . Unfortunately, a number of the personnel hired by L-3 and Titan have been barely competent and several have been indicted for criminal acts.”
According to Chatterjee, “L-3/Titan’s work has been criticized harshly by the military for poor performance and it has lost its biggest contract — but company executives recently cut a deal with the winning bidder and the military to keep part of the work.”
Amazingly, Chatterjee continues, “[R]eports suggest that the company also provides intelligence services such as translation to more secretive agencies like the Counter intelligence Field Activity (CFA) and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which have also been affected.”
By the way, Chatterjee explains, his research is fairly accurate as his Corp Watch team “has been fortunate to draw directly from the experiences of numerous military and civilian interrogators and translators who have come forward as anonymous whistle-blowers. The U.S. military has responded to some information requests on the financial details of the contract, but L-3 officials have failed to return repeated email and phone requests to discuss their work over the last two years. The military has refused to discuss the actual implementation of the contract. ‘We’re not going to talk about intelligence contracts,’ Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, spokesman for the Multi-National Force Command in Baghdad, told Corp Watch.”
Due to L-3’s silence on the Corp Watch team’s report, it was appropriate that Democracy Now invite a former employee of L-3 to speak out.
Marwan Mawiri tells of how he was hired by L-3/Titan, He explains that “it was a very simple conversation for less than a minute. In less than a minute’s conversation, my Arabic language skill was tested, my English language skill was tested, and I passed. And that was the case with hundreds of hired in—or that were hired in the US. And when we got to Washington, D.C., and we started going through the hiring process, you know, I was shocked and surprised that many of the people they hired inside the United States, if you were just to give them a simple Arabic language test or an English language test to see how proficient they are in translations, they will not pass. I mean, we literally had people who needed help filling out their employment application. We needed—you know, I was helping some of the people they hired to fill out their, you know, background investigation application.”
In short, this is the kind of hiring process used for hiring front-line interpreters for the U.S. military by Titan (which was more recently incorporated into L-3).
Juan Gonzalez of DN asked Marwan Mawari about his training in Iraq.
Mawari responded that he was given no training in Iraq, “No training what to expect in Iraq. No training what the field work going to look like. No training on how you should be translating in a proper manner. No training even how to deal with simple things when it comes to, you know, what if you had issues and problems, you know—and what was most shocking is, even the site manager or the so-called site manager they had, you know, in the field, were unskilled, unqualified. I mean, some of these people literally had no experience even in managing more than three, four, five people. One of the site managers we dealt with was a truck driver.”
The pay packet at that time for translators was up to $100,000 in 2003 in Iraq.
Since then, over 200 translators have been killed in Iraq.
Mawari shares, “We were frontline translators. We were embedded with the soldiers. Wherever the soldiers went, we went. Whether it was, you know, a civil affair mission or a, you know, 3:00 in the morning mission raid or, you know, I mean, we were there, we were taking bullets. You know, we were with the soldiers, so wherever the soldier went, we went. And, you know, what was so amazing, that the company has promised that they will provide us with body armors, they will provide us with special uniforms that will keep us protected, but that never happened.”
In short, this L-3/Titan company doesn’t care enough to provide armor or proper equipment to translators in the most dangerous and most important positions.
In both the short and the long term, what do such practices and negligence do to the level of intelligence America can get from a civilian translator?
SUMMARY
I could rage on and on about how linguists and languages specialists are historically abused, left unheard from, or even killed due to military negligence and the characteristics of war-time hazards.
My main point in this conclusion is simply that America, if the USA is to compete with China, Russia or the Middle East in the coming decades, it is going to need a lot more language talent and cultural know-how than it has on hand today.
Instead of wasting more money on such companies as KBR, Bechtel, and L-3, why doesn’t the U.S. government provide language scholarships to about 15 to 25 million Americans over the next ten years?
I mean full-ride scholarships that cover one’s whole university tuition—or even one’s post graduate tuition.
Then Americans could more bravely wander the world and not have to hide in military camps because they can’t tell the differences between different peoples whose lands they have occupied—or are even desiring to protect.
With such skills, we would also feel more confident on the global world stage. As well, we would be more competent, i.e. socially, holistically, and economically.
Salam a’laikum.
NOTES
Chatterjee, Pratap, “Outsourcing Intelligence Iraq: Corporate Watch Report on L-3 Titan”, http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15017
“CorpWatch’s Pratap Chatterjee and Ex-Titan Translator Marwan Mawiri on Corporate Cronyism and Intelligence Outsourcing in Iraq” http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/30/corpwatchs_pratap_chatterjee_and_ex_titan
Stoda, Kevin, “Letter from Fiji: A Call for America to Recognize Reforms”, http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_alone_071024_letter_from_fiji_3a__a.htm
Stoda, Kevin “OUTSIDE THE U.S.A.: JOBS AND JOBS CONDITION REPORT SEPTEMBER 2007” http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_alone_070905_with_millions_of_ame.htm
By Kevin Stoda, American teaching in Kuwait
I have been certified in teaching English, Spanish and German for nearly two decades. In the interim, I have taught foreign languages in Germany, Japan, Nicaragua, Mexico, the Unite Arab Emirates, and Kuwait. I have also worked in or volunteered in Honduras, Spain and Costa Rica. However, my original field of teacher training was history and the social sciences.
Meanwhile, I have also observed over the past three decades that America continues to be way behind the curve in terms of “global intelligence’.
By using the phrase “global intelligence”, I am not just implying CIA-style or military intelligence. I am referring to all the range of common-sense-, geographic-, person-to-person-, and emotional intelligences which enable one to communicate well orally or in writing. Moreover, I am referring to the cultural, social, political, anthropologic, and ethnic intelligences needed to compete fairly and properly in a global market place, such as in China today.
Having spent a great portion of my adult life as an American ambassador abroad, I have often taken time to learn as much as I could about the language and culture where I have been working in. Therefore, I have some competence in reading Arabic and in speaking Japanese as well.
Believe me! Even if immersed in a different culture most of one’s working day, one still has to work hard to acquire those linguistic and socio-cultural intelligences mentioned above.
However, American government officials, generals, and leaders in the American economy have never applied the time and resources necessary to acquire language competencies at an acceptable level—at least not since WWII.
Moreover, there has been a common belief that buying or hiring the right people who do have such competence, any company or military can function well in a foreign land.
Mistakenly, it is also commonly believed that by hiring those people with both some language skills and personal connections along the way, any company or army can overcome all the most important obstacles and language-cultural deficits.
A CULTURE OF EXCESS AND LOW LEVEL ACHIEVEMENT
According to CorpWatch Managing Editor, Pratap Chatterjee, who was embedded recently with U.S. troops in Iraq, “Remember, out of the 160,000 troops, we had 100,000 stay on the bases. And they are really not—we talked to a soldier, and we said, ‘Well, what do you—how do you communicate with Iraqis?’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, the Iraqis on the base, they’re pretty happy.’ And I’m like, ‘But there aren’t any Iraqis on the base. The people you’re meeting on the base are Indian.’ And this food is provided, you know, to the troops by Indian workers who are paid, if they’re cleaners, $9 a day; if they’re cooks, $20 a day; if you’re a cashier, $30 a day. And it’s driven in by Fijian truck drivers. And I spent some time hanging out with Fijian truck drivers in Kuwait. These guys have driven a hundred trips to Iraq, from Kuwait City to Mosul, to Anaconda, to places around there, and they’re paid $180 a trip. So the very fact that there are beans and bullets in Iraq is a result of, you know, third world workers providing this stuff to troops.”
Only an under-competent (culturally and linguistically) military force would not know that the people around them for months at a time were speaking Hindi and other languages rather than Arabic. That is, only an under trained (in terms of language and culture group of enemy) 100,000 man force sitting on bases in Iraq could manage to state with calmness and a straight face, “Reading the media, you know, I thought this was a lot more dangerous place.”
Nonetheless, this is the kind of comment Managing Editor Chatterjee of Corp Watch reported in a recent Democracy Now interview. He adds, “And the idea really is, when soldiers are there, is they get provided with good food, as much of it as they want. They get food four times a day. They have internet. They have video games they can play. The idea is to remove them from the reality of Iraq and to make them feel at home. And we were talking to a young soldier from Mississippi, and he said, “Reading the media, you know, I thought this was a lot more dangerous place.”
Yet, that is what Chatterjees observed at times.
Moreover, Chatterjee tells us, “In 2004, there was a trucking contract with a company called PWC from Kuwait. They’re driving things into Iraq, and they have hired drivers who are not competent, who can’t drive these trucks. And the military says, ‘We’re not going to change anything. We know this was true.’ Colonel Moreland himself said, ‘There was a problem the first year.’ I said, ‘Well, why didn’t you do something about it?’ He says, ‘Because, you know, we’re at war.” I mean, this is the reality. And this is why KBR knows it can get away with workers—particularly management, with charging a lot. It really is a culture of excess.’”
One could say that the U.S. military is just doing what it does best and neglecting the rest. However, one might also say that its incompetence in the realm of foreign languages leave officers with oversight duty unable to do their duties effectively once they leave the U.S. for foreign soil.
WHY IS THERE NOT BETTER OVERSIGHT OR SERVICE?
The American Spirit of we-can-do-it is a wash-out in Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan and elsewhere where international corporations pick off billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer money due to the military’s lack of in intelligience in language and cross-cultural skills. This is why there is a plethora of incapacities to do proper and fair accounting of what things are costing us all in this War on Terrorism.
Moreover, according to Chatterjee’s research involving U.S. military brass in Iraq and Kuwait, historically speaking, in times of war, the U.S. military is typically not interested in holding the reigns on corruption and bad policy or procedures as long as things work—i.e. if the system isn’t 100% broke, don’t fix it.
Why not take this attitude when more and more money floods your weight despite linguistic and intelligence capabilities to see that money and resources are used efficiently?
Chatterjee doesn’t mention that one half of the problem with the USA in the Middle East these days is that without proper people in place translating the goings-on around them to every single general and corporal, most American personnel in key positions to improve the status quo will not know what is going wrong until something hits them in the face.
Meanwhile, according to Chatterjee, the U.S. military and the U.S. government outsource so much intelligence gathering it is dangerous.
In other words, bad intelligence leads to people (of the wrong people) getting killed.
Simply put--bad translations and signage communications can do the same thing.
I recall that the U.S. military was until recently shooting on site anyone getting near certain convoy trucks in Iraq, i.e. as the convoys were driving between Kuwait and Iraq. The signs posted on the tractor trailers told drivers to keep more than a couple hundred meters away--but the sign could only be read from less than a hundred meters away—and only if one knew exactly where the sign was posted on the vehicle.
Meanwhile the U.S. military depends on a third world force of hundreds of thousands to get supplies back and forth between Kuwait and Iraq each day. They are paid at a fraction of the cost that Americans would be paid in similar positions.
NOTE: I have written elsewhere of planeloads of Fijians who were told to there surprise on their arrival to work that they would not begin working in a warehouse in Kuwait as they had signed up in Fiji to do. The KBR subcontractor, PWC (Agility)of Kuwait, demanded that they needed to learn to drive long distance trucks because they would be going to Iraq on a daily basis.
How much long distance trucking goes on in the Fiji Islands, guys? Moreover, how much Arabic is learned out in Fiji?
In short, by hiring people from all over the third world, the Pentagon and the U.S. military industrial complex has been able to hide behind great mountains of mismanagement & fraud--and still make a huge profit.
Why and How?
This is naturally, partially because Americans both can’t and don’t monitor military expenditures very well in Arabic and in other languages. Also, it is because wars are big parties of excess--or at least need to be engineered to seem like parties so as to keep those wars going for very long. Fexample, in describing the “culture of excess”, Chatterjee noted, “ It’s different from what I thought. Basically, the idea of the military here [in Iraq and Kuwait] is to provide as much as possible to the troops so that they have sort of a hometown experience. We’re talking about Southern comfort food. You have some menus here, you know, an Easter menu, an Indian night menu. You know, soldiers are provided with, you know, bacon, pork loin, jellybeans, waffle bars.”
I don’t overdue it soldiers—American soldiers—are dying everyday in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. However, the entire process has been rife incompetence, misleading management, fraud, and marked by gluttonous habits of corporate America and of neighboring regional firms. All this sometimes makes me most ill.
By the way, I am not alone in this.
I interviewed Arab speaking accountant, with U.S. citizenship, recently. He works at local military bases in Kuwait and he concurred that he and other accountants are also made ill by all the fraud and waste they have witnessed over the past half decade.
TRANSLATORS INC.
Chatterjee has written elsewhere about the waste in spending carried out by the logistics arms of outsourced military contracting.
For example, he recently shared that the Manhattan- and San Diego based “L-3/Titan is now probably the second largest employer in Iraq (after Kellogg, Brown & Root, a former Halliburton subsidiary) with almost 7,000 translators and more than 300 intelligence specialists. . . . Unfortunately, a number of the personnel hired by L-3 and Titan have been barely competent and several have been indicted for criminal acts.”
According to Chatterjee, “L-3/Titan’s work has been criticized harshly by the military for poor performance and it has lost its biggest contract — but company executives recently cut a deal with the winning bidder and the military to keep part of the work.”
Amazingly, Chatterjee continues, “[R]eports suggest that the company also provides intelligence services such as translation to more secretive agencies like the Counter intelligence Field Activity (CFA) and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), which have also been affected.”
By the way, Chatterjee explains, his research is fairly accurate as his Corp Watch team “has been fortunate to draw directly from the experiences of numerous military and civilian interrogators and translators who have come forward as anonymous whistle-blowers. The U.S. military has responded to some information requests on the financial details of the contract, but L-3 officials have failed to return repeated email and phone requests to discuss their work over the last two years. The military has refused to discuss the actual implementation of the contract. ‘We’re not going to talk about intelligence contracts,’ Lieutenant Colonel Barry Johnson, spokesman for the Multi-National Force Command in Baghdad, told Corp Watch.”
Due to L-3’s silence on the Corp Watch team’s report, it was appropriate that Democracy Now invite a former employee of L-3 to speak out.
Marwan Mawiri tells of how he was hired by L-3/Titan, He explains that “it was a very simple conversation for less than a minute. In less than a minute’s conversation, my Arabic language skill was tested, my English language skill was tested, and I passed. And that was the case with hundreds of hired in—or that were hired in the US. And when we got to Washington, D.C., and we started going through the hiring process, you know, I was shocked and surprised that many of the people they hired inside the United States, if you were just to give them a simple Arabic language test or an English language test to see how proficient they are in translations, they will not pass. I mean, we literally had people who needed help filling out their employment application. We needed—you know, I was helping some of the people they hired to fill out their, you know, background investigation application.”
In short, this is the kind of hiring process used for hiring front-line interpreters for the U.S. military by Titan (which was more recently incorporated into L-3).
Juan Gonzalez of DN asked Marwan Mawari about his training in Iraq.
Mawari responded that he was given no training in Iraq, “No training what to expect in Iraq. No training what the field work going to look like. No training on how you should be translating in a proper manner. No training even how to deal with simple things when it comes to, you know, what if you had issues and problems, you know—and what was most shocking is, even the site manager or the so-called site manager they had, you know, in the field, were unskilled, unqualified. I mean, some of these people literally had no experience even in managing more than three, four, five people. One of the site managers we dealt with was a truck driver.”
The pay packet at that time for translators was up to $100,000 in 2003 in Iraq.
Since then, over 200 translators have been killed in Iraq.
Mawari shares, “We were frontline translators. We were embedded with the soldiers. Wherever the soldiers went, we went. Whether it was, you know, a civil affair mission or a, you know, 3:00 in the morning mission raid or, you know, I mean, we were there, we were taking bullets. You know, we were with the soldiers, so wherever the soldier went, we went. And, you know, what was so amazing, that the company has promised that they will provide us with body armors, they will provide us with special uniforms that will keep us protected, but that never happened.”
In short, this L-3/Titan company doesn’t care enough to provide armor or proper equipment to translators in the most dangerous and most important positions.
In both the short and the long term, what do such practices and negligence do to the level of intelligence America can get from a civilian translator?
SUMMARY
I could rage on and on about how linguists and languages specialists are historically abused, left unheard from, or even killed due to military negligence and the characteristics of war-time hazards.
My main point in this conclusion is simply that America, if the USA is to compete with China, Russia or the Middle East in the coming decades, it is going to need a lot more language talent and cultural know-how than it has on hand today.
Instead of wasting more money on such companies as KBR, Bechtel, and L-3, why doesn’t the U.S. government provide language scholarships to about 15 to 25 million Americans over the next ten years?
I mean full-ride scholarships that cover one’s whole university tuition—or even one’s post graduate tuition.
Then Americans could more bravely wander the world and not have to hide in military camps because they can’t tell the differences between different peoples whose lands they have occupied—or are even desiring to protect.
With such skills, we would also feel more confident on the global world stage. As well, we would be more competent, i.e. socially, holistically, and economically.
Salam a’laikum.
NOTES
Chatterjee, Pratap, “Outsourcing Intelligence Iraq: Corporate Watch Report on L-3 Titan”, http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15017
“CorpWatch’s Pratap Chatterjee and Ex-Titan Translator Marwan Mawiri on Corporate Cronyism and Intelligence Outsourcing in Iraq” http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/30/corpwatchs_pratap_chatterjee_and_ex_titan
Stoda, Kevin, “Letter from Fiji: A Call for America to Recognize Reforms”, http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_alone_071024_letter_from_fiji_3a__a.htm
Stoda, Kevin “OUTSIDE THE U.S.A.: JOBS AND JOBS CONDITION REPORT SEPTEMBER 2007” http://www.opednews.com/articles/genera_alone_070905_with_millions_of_ame.htm
posted by Kevin Anthony Stoda at 7:12 PM
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