Re: Another Sterling Massachusetts Alum


McDuck wrote:
On 14 May 2006 20:35:12 -0700, "BadgerBC"
<neilrichardson3819@xxxxxxxxxxx> quacked:


McDuck wrote:
On 14 May 2006 17:56:47 -0700, "BadgerBC"
<neilrichardson3819@xxxxxxxxxxx> quacked:

The simple reality is that
the country lacks foreign language skills. There are tens of thousands
of pages of documentation that the US captured in Afghanistan when the
forces raided Al Qaeda strongholds that are still in the pipeline
waiting for translation. That is why all SIGINT efforts suffer from
the human bottleneck. They have been trying to develop a translation
architecture for years but as anyone who had used babelfish
understands, we're far from being there yet. Most leading universities
reduced linguistics departments during the cutback in the 1980s and
1990s and we are paying for that now.

Do you mean LANGUAGE departments? Linguistic departments have always
been tiny, and might be relevant for code breaking but I would not
think would be v. important for translation. Anyway, language
departments were both cut and courses. But that change was almost
totally demand driven --- the courses were running nearly empty when
they were cut. In general, Universities are slow to cut traditional
courses with faculty around to defend them. If there had been
students, there would have been courses. I would add that Arabic
courses were quite rare at Universities in the US in any event. Here
the issue is lack of professors as well as lack of interested
students.

Linguistics (as Columbia eliminated the department pretty much in the
late 80s and others like Dartmouth, Arizona St, reduced it to
interdisciplinary programs). You're right as it was demand driven and
now places like Brandeis, Minnesota and Berkeley are trying to meet the
demand placed by the federal government with renewed emphasis on
applied linguistics. I also agree about the demand driven nature of
undergraduate language course availability (as I remember there were
only three universities that offered Korean beyond introductory level
in the US back in the 1970s).

I see --- you were talking about an improved Bablefish, for which
linguists would be useful.

In order to handle the sheer volume of traffic, this is the highest
priority project the US intelligence community is placing right now.
They're not having too many problems i terms of intercepts AFAIK
according to the declassified informaton, but the explosion of signal
intelligence and electronic communication (internet, cellular phones)
has completely overwhelmed the community's ability to handle and
process the raw intelligence reasonably quickly (it's just not possible
using traditional methods). That is why they are doing traffic
analysis rather than looking for the traditional needle in the
haystack. Back in the 1980s and even in the 1990s they were able to
pinpoint certain transmissions (like the Libyan transmission that
confirmed their role in the Berlin disco bombing and the Soviet coup
planning against the Gorbachev). I'm not sure if they are making as
much progress based on what has leaked on the Trailblazer program which
apparently has been disastrous.


In terms of requisite translators in
languages like Pashtu, Urdu, Farsi and Korean are still very much in
demand (mostly because the native speakers generally can't get the
clearance).

Urdu (which is essentially Hindi) and Korean ought to be easy. I even
know some Hindi <g>, and there should be plenty of Indians with
clearance who speak Urdu well. But they also have to know Arabic
script as well as the spoken language, which cuts the field a bit
(leaving me out, for example --- not that I know enough to do any
translation anyway)


The problem is that TS clearance generally requires (unless the person
is third generation native born) a candidate to account for every year
of his life these days. Until Ames, the only (known) penetration into
the CIA were the translators (Koecher, Larry Wu-Tai Chin) which is the
main reason why despite the shortage they are still enforcing very
strict vetting procedures. I guess the FBI (because they are
bureaucratically in such a mess) is even in worse shape in terms of
translators as it appears everyone is fighting for the small number of
translators and (even rarer) regional analysts.

Here in Detroit, by the way, the Pakistanis have serious border
crossing probems to this day, whereas the Indians cross easily
(although India has the larger Muslim population).

Amazing that there are problems with Korean, given the significant
immigrant base. I think Farsi used to be taught some in a few
universities --- my sister learned some (and Turkish), but with the
government. I doubt there was much call for Pashtu at many US
universities <g>. I don't think Harvard taught it when I was there.


There are thousands of Korean Americans in the military (especially the
Army) but for some reason or another very few seem fluent. Perhaps it
had more to do with their assimilation process (I knew a few guys whose
parents wanted them to speak only English at home to help them
academically early on). It's a shame. What probably will have to
happen (and it's starting to come on line) is what the federal
government did during the Cold War which is to incentivize the
universities with Slavic language programs (e.g. through IREX) and the
old Sovietology research institutes (Harriman, Davis, etc.). We never
lacked Russian translators,



From what I understand, there are so few applied
linguistics specialists in the US that most of them are working in the
private sector with very small number of people in the graduate
pipelines for the federal government to even recruit them at this point
to aid the development of the translation architecture.


Seems likely.

<snip>



Pardon my ignorance, but who is UBL? Is it Osama bin Laden? Why the U?

Apparently that is the acronym used in almost all US government
internal documents (declassified CIA cables, State memoranda, the FBI
briefings etc. as well DOD) as they choose to transliterate as Usama
bin Laden.


Interesting. I guess the acronym got set in concrete before the US
newspapers agreed on the spelling.

I think so. I had always seen Osama in the US mainstream media, but
looking at the declassified documents, they've used the DOD
transliteration for some reason. The French (well Le Figaro) use
Oussama Ben Laden which doesn't help me either.

.

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