Where to Find More Military Interpreters? Do Tell.

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Posted by Nataly Kelly on February 18, 2010 in the following blogs: Business Globalization, Interpreting, Best Practices
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This month, U.S. President Barack Obama called for an end to the 16-year-old "don't ask, don't tell" policy. The top two defense officials, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Admiral Michael Mullen, followed suit. How will this change affect the U.S. military's ability to staff languages of limited demand and critical need?

As detailed in a 2005 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office ("Financial Costs and Loss of Critical Skills Due to DOD's Homosexual Conduct Policy Cannot Be Completely Estimated"), 322 individuals dismissed from the military for being gay were trained in "an important foreign language." That group included 54 individuals who were skilled in Arabic -- at a time when the military faced severe shortages of qualified interpreters and translation backlogs that potentially put national security at risk.

While 322 people may not sound like that many, it can be a tall order to find competent interpreters even for domestic needs, let alone ones that happen to be fluent in languages such as Pashto (Afghanistan) or Kurdish Kurmanji (Iraq) and are qualified to serve in the military. Add to that sought-after résumé yet another requirement -- willingness to put one's life at risk in the line of duty -- and you can get a sense of just how scarce these linguistic resources really are.

That number -- 322 interpreters -- suddenly seems more significant when one considers that this is approximately the same number of linguists who have died interpreting for U.S. forces during the war in Iraq so far, as reported by the BBC. Clearly, the discharged soldiers are not clamoring after posts that are cushy or glamorous. To be an interpreter in a time of war is to accept one of the riskiest -- and often most reviled -- assignments of all. As conveyed by the Italian adage traduttore, traditore, the work of a translator (traduttore) is all-too-often associated with being viewed as a traitor (traditore).

So, it's understandable that the U.S. federal government -- which spent US$2.1 billion on language services in the past two years alone -- isn't wasting any time in calling these interpreters and translators back to the linguistic trenches. Last week, Arabic linguist and West Point graduate Lt. Dan Choi was called back to active duty. We predict that more of the previously dismissed interpreters and translators will return back to the military ranks, one valuable linguist at a time.

While it's too soon to tell if the government will espouse the "No Linguist Left Behind" policy that we suggested in 2005, Lt. Choi's return may mark the beginning of a time when more of the language-skilled soldiers who want to serve will actually be able to do so.

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