US Intelligence to Hire Interpreters and Translators
By: Mick, February 20th, 2007
With today’s swearing in of Mike McConnell as the new Director of National Intelligence, the US government is planning to focus on the hiring of fluent speakers of key languages in the War on Terror. Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, and other languages of the Middle East and South Asia are in the highest demand. An article in the Arab News recently reported the glaring shortage fluent speakers of these key languages in every branch of US Intelligence.
Even at the State Department, only 10 of 34,000 employees are rated fully fluent in Arabic.
That is a staggering figure and should be the driving force that will open doors for hundreds and perhaps thousands of first- and second-generation Americans who speak these in-demand languages fluently and have a personal understanding of the cultures and lifestyles of those parts of the world.
Entries
September 20th, 2007 at 8:24 am
The United States Government is still repeating its mistakes. Another terrible calamity awaits her unless she takes the right steps in the right direction to avert danger at the right time.
The truth is that our great country is very poor in mastering world languages and is not willing to use non-American language professionals as Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS was doing through its offices around the world. From Abidjan in Ivory coast, the FBIS recruited Independent contractors who were translating terrorists statements, plans and actions from Open source, electronic and Print media in Nigeria, Chad, Niger and other key African countries where terrorists use as attack planning grounds.. But today, it has stopped.
The indisputable truth is that the terrorists have changed their strategies. They have studied strange languages to further complicate the CIA efforts in trying to denystify them.
September 20th, 2007 at 8:30 am
The languages of present day in Africa and for the intelligence Community must include, Igbo which is spoken by over 50 million Nigerians, Hausa by over 55 million and Yruba by about 40 million Nigerians, Swahili, Xhosa and Fulani must not be left out.
September 20th, 2007 at 10:50 am
David,
I don’t know enough about the workings of the US Intelligence community (or terrorists) to offer any relevant comments on your thoughts. However, your points seem to be in line with our government’s tradition of reactionary policy, only moving after the fact. Hopefully those policies are changing in order to say ahead of the tactics you’ve described.
January 10th, 2008 at 5:49 am
The United States of America spends a lot of money in non-challenging areas of needs. I fear for this great country for falling short of linguistic sufficiency. The next genaeration wars shall be fought using language intelligence. The enemies of the Eagle are busy learning the wind source so as to glide as fly past the Eagle.
Let us make haste while the sun shuines.