We still don't grasp the value of translators

[pjmunson]

They always sell themselves that way and it is true. They are also negligent in their refusal to properly tailor their curriculum, or at least some courses, to the operating forces.

Whenever you pay people to do language all day long, five days a week for six to eighteen months and provide the greatest collection of native language speakers in one place AND don't give them anything else (college classes, other burdens, jobs to pay college bills) then you are going to have a great capacity to teach languages. That is why DLI is the best in the world and that is also why it is criminal that they cannot do better with what they've got.

One problem is that the school is only aimed at producing professional linguists in one mold and it is assumed that they will be back for following intermediate and advanced courses, dialect courses, etc. Thus, it focuses on learning a language clasically, stressing grammar, writing etc, to the detriment of being able to actually use it to communicate with people on the street. It is also very focused on listening and document reading rather than conversation and spends a lot of time on creating skills, such as detailed transcription, translation, and other listening skills, that not all linguists will need. I do think that we need to have people who have such a good basis, but the school should have stood up a program more focused on interacting with native speakers shortly after 9/11 to run alongside their main courses. So, you've got HUMINT guys and FAOs who are going to do a lot more face-to-face interaction studying alongside folks who are going to spend their careers listening to recordings and the skill sets are different. If you need operational language capability now, you can't wait to train up a linguist through three separate schools (basic, intermed, advanced). You need to focus the training.

With regard to Arabic, a major stumbling block is that despite the pleas of operational linguists, highly experienced military language instructors, some native instructors that worked as terps or in their own militaries, and even language academics at other premier institutions, DLI institutionally refuses to move away from the complete Modern Standard Arabic model they've run for years and move toward what many call "Educated Spoken Arabic." Basically, all literate Arabs know how to read MSA and understand it spoken, so it is the language of the press, official forums, etc. If you can speak MSA, almost anyone will understand you. Problem is, most people will respond to you in some mix of dialect. DLI says we can't teach all the dialects, so we won't try at all. However, other schools and agencies recognize that there is a core of common words that a lot of the dialects share and that you can teach a "standard dialect." DLI will have none of it. So, if a DLI grad from the Arabic basic course is stellar and attains a 3/3, which is on the order of less than 10% of the graduating population, from my limited experience, they still won't understand when an Arab in any city says "What are you doing here" because all the words in that sentence differ from MSA to dialect, but they are relatively common between dialects. To give an indication of the problem, the words that vary between MSA and dialect are basic, critical words: to do, to see, to look, to go, question words, negation, now, today, tomorrow, left, go straight, man, woman, etc. If one learns the standard dialect, Arabs will still be able to go deeper into their local dialect and not be understood, but if they want to communicate with you, they will be able to. Not all Arabs can easily speak to you in MSA though, or will try to.

If the right pressure was brought to bear, the school could be training at least some of your linguists, intel types, and FAOs to speak this standard dialect and could emphasize speaking conversationally over transcription, translation, and other more technical linguist skills, but to date the bureaucracy has successfully resisted.

[davidbfpo]

Given that there are refugee / expatriate communities from around the world in the developed / Western world, why can't we recruit from them? I read elsewhere today that 40k Afghans reside in the Ukraine, as a settled community; I concede they may not be Pathans - the current need.

A colleague who served in Kabul a few years ago referred to working with Swedish-Iranians (as Farsi was close to Dari) and another that Canada has Canadian-Afghans who wish to serve.

Just seems from this armchair that the responses have been 'stovepiped' and lack imagination.

davidbfpo

[IntelTrooper]

A colleague who served in Kabul a few years ago referred to working with Swedish-Iranians (as Farsi was close to Dari) and another that Canada has Canadian-Afghans who wish to serve.

We don't really have a lack of Dari speakers. We need Pashtu speakers, who are more difficult to find. Specifically, Pashtu speakers who are also US citizens.

[carl]

The most distressing thing about this thread is that the "can do" "we'll figure something out" attitude of yesteryear has been replaced by a modern attitude that can't get anything done, even if everybody acknowledges it to be important. And I don't mean the guys commenting on this thread, I mean the gov and military as a whole. There is always a good reason why they won't do it.

I know this will never happen, but what if you just made a program whereby any soldier who demonstrated a certain level of language proficiency were given a huge monthly bonus, say $2,000? Let the men figure out how they learned on their own. The idea is to motivate the language "naturals" into action. Would that kind of thing be at all practicable, aside from the bureaucratic reluctance?

Since the F-22 has been mentioned, if you ever really need an F-22, 20,000 world class terps could not substitute. I know the point is about spending money wisely and the F-22 is a shining target but there may come a day...and there will be NO substitute.

[Uboat509]

I suspect that part of the reason that the military does not have more terps in house is that the military takes a long view of the whole thing. Sure, we need a lot of Pashto speakers now but, eventually, we will leave there. In today's contentious political climate you never know if that might not be sooner rather than later. If that does happen, what do you do with all the extra Pashto speakers? That's why the military likes contractors for a lot of things. If we don't need them tomorrow, we just don't renew their contracts. Whereas if we fill those needs in house and the requirement goes away or at least gets reduced a lot then we still have all those bodies that we can't just get rid of. Now we have to either retrain them, which after all the resources spent on training them in the first place is not particularly attractive option, or we have a draw-down, which is also expensive.

SFC W

[pjmunson]

They did considerably up the language proficiency pay, although not nearly as much as you suggest, Carl. The max is far less than that figure, although nothing to sneeze at, but in order to get the max, you have to be professionally proficient, or nearly so, in three testable languages. Add to the problem the fact that the Defense Language Proficiency Test has nothing to do with your ability to rap with someone in Dari, Pashtu, or Arabic, but has everything to do with whether you can read newspaper and magazine passages and listen to Syrian soap operas and al-Jazeera and then answer questions meant more to stump the chump than to test your comprehension. So our metrics are off because they do not test the skills we need to employ operationally. For those who might think this sounds like sour grapes, I get 3/3 on the Arabic test, so I'm not mad that I can't pass it. I'm mad that the system is so broke and no matter how hard you try, the arrogant "academics" at DLI and the inertia of the bureaucracy there stymie all efforts.

That's where, as you said pretty much, "can do" runs into a brick wall. For a number of reasons, from the agencies where DLI's money comes from, to the cultural factors that affect how the native instructors want to teach their languages, to the fact that they're trying to teach last year's high school grads how to understand passages in a foreign language that cover college level topics (for instance an article about pegged and floating currencies... it made no sense to them, even once translated), the ship there has a broken rudder. And even when they have forums to try to get input, responses range from defensive counters to every point to DoD officials telling students and instructors who try to bring up valid points that they are out of line because they're not saying that DLI is doing great. Eight years and really all they've done beyond some curriculum reorganziation and cramming an extra semester in on the students' backs is to hand out iPods, and I think now laptops, to every stud. As is typical anymore, technology money rains freely down, but if you try to suggest substantive improvements it is too hard or off base.

[Schmedlap]

An anecdote, FWIW

We had great interpreters in Baghdad in 2003. They were individuals whom we recruited ourselves off the street. I worked with several terps who were fluent in as many as six languages. One was a former Iraqi General who spoke 6 languages and knew Tariq Aziz. Another was an ex-pat who returned to Iraq from the UK, relieved that Saddam was gone. He, too, spoke 6 languages. We had several who grew up in Iraq and went to college in the UK. Another was the son of a doctor who went to medical school in California. His English was indistinguishable from that of my Soldiers, to include slang and profanity. I could go on.

We HAD great interpreters. Some worked for free, at first, because we had no means to pay them. Then their pay was eventually upped to something ridiculous, like $3 a day (which barely covered the taxi rides to and from our patrol base). But then the situation deteriorated and they were too scared to continue working with us, so in later deployments we relied on whomever Titan could recruit. That is why in OIF III I once spent 20 minutes struggling through a conversation with an Iraqi Colonel. Finally, in frustration, he started talking to me in English, pointing out that, "your interpreter is incompetent. He doesn't understand English or Arabic."

We once received an interpreter with one leg who was on crutches. You can't make this up. Here we were, an Infantry Company in a patrol base that was covered in 3 feet of dust (I mean, literally, it was like walking through a fresh snowfall) and they send us a guy on LOGPAC who can't even exit the HMMWV without someone helping him. We sent him back on the same LOGPAC. We received another "interpreter" whom we couldn't even communicate with. I don't know what languages he spoke, but English apparently wasn't one of them. I mean, he couldn't even tell us what his name was. Talking to him was more difficult than talking to an Iraqi.

[Ken White]

for 'efficiency' and to preclude 'fraud, waste and abuse.' Effectiveness goes down the tube. The end result is almost invariably greater expense through hidden costs and unintended consequences. Plus it tends to get people killed unnecessarily...

It amazes me that Congress -- the real culprits -- are willing to trust the Schmedlaps to take the sons and daughters of their voters into combat but do not believe they can be trusted to hire interpreters, pay informers or pay for minor projects.

Actually, it isn't amazing, it's just pathetic.

My son's platoon in Iraq had a good interpreter for their whole tour. That, too was before the 'system' took over...

[Tukhachevskii]

With regard to Arabic, a major stumbling block is that despite the pleas of operational linguists, highly experienced military language instructors, some native instructors that worked as terps or in their own militaries, and even language academics at other premier institutions, DLI institutionally refuses to move away from the complete Modern Standard Arabic model they've run for years and move toward what many call "Educated Spoken Arabic." Basically, all literate Arabs know how to read MSA and understand it spoken, so it is the language of the press, official forums, etc. If you can speak MSA, almost anyone will understand you. Problem is, most people will respond to you in some mix of dialect. DLI says we can't teach all the dialects, so we won't try at all. However, other schools and agencies recognize that there is a core of common words that a lot of the dialects share and that you can teach a "standard dialect." DLI will have none of it. So, if a DLI grad from the Arabic basic course is stellar and attains a 3/3, which is on the order of less than 10% of the graduating population, from my limited experience, they still won't understand when an Arab in any city says "What are you doing here" because all the words in that sentence differ from MSA to dialect, but they are relatively common between dialects. To give an indication of the problem, the words that vary between MSA and dialect are basic, critical words: to do, to see, to look, to go, question words, negation, now, today, tomorrow, left, go straight, man, woman, etc. If one learns the standard dialect, Arabs will still be able to go deeper into their local dialect and not be understood, but if they want to communicate with you, they will be able to. Not all Arabs can easily speak to you in MSA though, or will try to.

I agree with the above comments 100%. I went to Yemen back in 2007 because, apparently, the MSA taught their was the clearest to understand (and classes were cheaper than Egypt). I soent nigh on 9 months comming to grips with Arabic and, thanks more to my tutor than to planning, picking up valuable Yemeni dialect as we wen on our travels. Yet, for all that study (I grapled my way to upper intermediate before I had to leave) I remember travelling to the Hadramout region in the South Eastern portion of Yemen with a German friend of mine who had served in the NVA (East German/DDR) only to arrive and not undertsand ONE word that was spoken there. Often described as Yemen's "Wild West" (and that's saying something) we found ourselves dumbstruck. Even the healthy dose of dialect we had picked up only turned out to be Sana'anian dialect which is essentially "city-speak". In fact, even travelling to the next governorate found our usefully deployable vocabulary drop by fifteen percent. A one week holiday in Lebanon found me similarly at a loss when I encountered what sounded like Arabic spoken in French accents by people who wondered who the hell the village yokel was attempting to communicate with them (Yemeni, it turns out, is about a desirable an accent to have as gonnorehea).

[Someguy]

I'm in the Pashto program at DLI. It has a terrible graduation rate from start to finish, less than 40%. The curriculum was written by non native English speakers without college degrees and the person with the education degree native language is Japanese. As a result, a student in the course will learn to say "I fly a kite" before he can count past 100.

On 1 Oct it goes to Cat IV and 63 weeks.

[Presley Cannady]

My experience is that considerable immersion is essential to develop minimally useful language skills. So how do you teach proficiency in a language typically encountered only in a warzone?

Hint, there's no Little Afghanistan in Monterey. So why is the program located there?

[40below]

I was often asked by gearheads about the best piece of kit the Canadian Forces had in Afghanistan, whether it was the LAVs or the C7 or the Griffons or whatnot, and I usually responded by saying the most valuable thing they had in the field were the terps. Without them, you're nothing, all you can do is shoot.

They were local hires who put themselves at great personal risk – the rules said you couldn't take their photos or include them on video you shot there, and I note with approval that the Canadian government has offered fast-track immigration to Afghans who ordinarily wouldn't qualify for citizenship if they have worked extensively with the CF and their lives are subsequently in danger.

Also, a surprising number of the soldiers had taught themselves a little Pashto, not much more than restaurant French, from a series of web-based language programs floating around. They weren't fluent but on dismount patrols, a corporal could at least say hello to the locals in the streets, and the locals seemed impressed that a soldier could at least try to address them in their own language.

[Rex Brynen]

I was often asked by gearheads about the best piece of kit the Canadian Forces had in Afghanistan, whether it was the LAVs or the C7 or the Griffons or whatnot, and I usually responded by saying the most valuable thing they had in the field were the terps. Without them, you're nothing, all you can do is shoot.

Great comment.

[Backwards Observer]

There was a German guy we used to travel around Malaysia with who had been partly raised by his amah (local nanny) and was fluent in kampong melayu (a vernacular form of Bahasa Malay). The locals are generally easy-going and friendly, but you occasionally would meet with mild suspicion bordering on hostility from village-folk in the hinterlands. As soon as this guy would start yakkin' away at them in the lingo, their jaws would drop, eyes would bug out, then grins, then laughter, then they'd all be shaking their hands in disbelief and asking him over for dinner.

Happened practically every time; a hundred years earlier this guy could've been a rajah puteh or some such. It helped that he really seemed to understand the local humour, and being a younger cousin of Claus Von Stauffenberg probably didn't hurt his confidence either. Still, they should've put his amah in charge of a language school.