FBI Arab translators cheered Sept. 11

WND ^ | 1/7/04 | Paul Sperry

[Publius6961]

BULL! You can't take an adult, immerse him in a language, and then have him speaking it without an accent in six months. In fact he/she will always have some accent.

That is just the cosmetics of the problem. I have been bilingual all my life with Spanish (a relatively trivial language), and am continually amazed and surprised at the errors in meaning that subtle historical meanings of words have with identical roots with English. There's transliteration and translation, and it goes far beyond looking up the words in a dictionary. Subtle shades of differences have major consequences. I can just imagine the difficulties with a language as alien as Arabic, and its hundreds if not thousands of idioms, variants and slang words.

[livius]

Islam is not a religion in the sense that westerners grasp it.

A very important concept that we refuse to deal with.

But it was one thing that was certainly understood by the Egyptian translator/interpreter at the first WTC bombing trial, who went up to the crazy blind sheik afterwards and APOLOGIZED for not being able to help him more with his translation! And was so proud of himself for doing this that he actually boasted about it (and was applauded) at a translation organization meeting I attended last year.

[twigs]

Sir Richard Burton wrote about this over a hundred years ago. He learned Arabic as an adult, along with a number of other different languages, many of them from the Middle East. He was so successful that he traveled with a group of Arabs, stayed in their homes and became one of the few non-Muslims ever to get into the Mecca shrine. His fear was not slipping in his use of the language, but in getting caught taking notes of what he had seen. That was considered western and would have immediately pegged him as such.

[FourPeas]

Having worked with several persons from the Middle East, this doesn't surprize me. I learned a lot from an Iranian man I worked for 14+ years ago. Many of the things he told me about Iraq, Saddam and the Arabic mind have been proven absolutely correct in the past few years. Simply put, their culture, even their way of thinking, is so completely different from those of us in the west, that we really can't afford to trust sensative translation to those of Arabic descent.

[angkor]

I can imagine what the DOD would do to someone 24/7 for six months.

The Defense Language Institute in Monterey has been doing this for decades, 22 languages including Arabic. Most of the programs are about a year. A friend - 100 percent American - trained in Russian there and became a translator.

NSA certainly has a wealth of trained analysts and translators who hold clearance.

So why is the FBI hiring security risks rather than training cleared personnel?

More unbelieveable incompetence in the management ranks at the agency.

[Hostage]

Why the investive? You should be above that.

I was talking about DOD and the article was talking about FBI. All of this happened before there was a DHS.

FYI the CIA has capability to mine through the data by recognizing key words and the honing in on details.

Once again, this was FBI pre-DHS.

[spodefly]

I wouldn't expect HS to "show us their playbook", but generally speaking I think HS is going to be compromised by the same politically correct nonsense that has obviously compromised the FBI and other alphabet agencies.

[Cvengr]

Consider the tone of politics under Clinton compared to the tone of politics today. Socialist democrats claim they are 'feeling the same misery' today that conservatives felt during Clinton's reign. (I personnally don't understand how they could be so pained unless it's simply a lust for amoral power). Nevertheless, such people exist and apparantly in significant numbers.

I also suspect a fifth column exists, but I find it to be more closely associated with many disparate groupings of interests being collectively operated upon. Not all members of those groups are fifth columnists, but there are groups with majorities who espouse the fifth column MO.

Groups which I would be cognizant of their behavior include environmentalists, homosexuals, LaRaza, antiChristian variants of Freemasonry and a multitude of their splinter factions, extreme liberal religious churches, and many non-profit organizations. Obviously not all members of these groups are 'fifth column oriented', but these groups seem to have a proclivity of inexplicable behavior not always associated with their primary direction preoccupying a good deal of their resources.....IMHO

[Dr. Scarpetta]

SHOCKING

[dirtboy]

I do NOT want to believe this story.

I'll believe it when I see it independently in an outlet other than WND.

[livius]

then let them translate from a hermetically-sealed cage in Cuba with food for each complete and accurate translation.

Well, that's another idea...of course, they've also had problems with their Arabic interpreters at Gitmo, so maybe that wouldn't work, either.

[Publius6961]

I can imagine what the DOD would do to someone 24/7 for six months. It is not unreasonable at all to expect they could churn out a language speaker with no detectable accent over a variety of phrases and responses, including cultural gestures such as using one's hands in a provincial manner.

This accent business is a red herring. Like making sure the deck chairs on the titanic are geometrically perfectly arranged. The critical and essential part of the training is accurate comprehension of regional dialects and double meanings. The elegance of our own language that is unconscious and that we take for granted. How the words are pronounced by the translator is irrelevant.

[doc30]

Edmonds filed a lawsuit, but Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller got a federal judge to block it by asserting the extremely rare claim of "State Secret Privilege."

If this is true, and I suspect it is, then both Ashcroft and Muller, by supporting translators that supported the 9/11 terrorist attacks, also supported the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Both of these people need to be fired by Bush. If G.W. doesn't fire them, then G.W. is also supporting the people that make terrorism, such as 9/11, real in this country.

[Hostage]

Thank you. You cut to the issue much faster than I. This is really a story about ***FBI*** incompetence. Let's hope DHS has resolved these problems.

[af_vet_1981]

I do NOT want to believe this story.

You had better believe it. The smug antiSemitism is real. Only now Americans die under their smirks.

I understand and expect bias from translators, especially if they are sympathetic to the targets. It would be naive to expect otherwise. The most egregious offense would be the mismanagement of those translators by the various agencies (all under the Bush administration by the way). That would be unforgivable. After September 11, there is no excuse. The Bush Administration should not tolerate antiSemitism in any of these agencies. Some of these agency people should stand trial when Americans die.

[mathluv]

Yasmeen Bleeth and Salma Hayek.

I have not heard Yasmeen Bleeth in quite awhile. What does she do now? I don't watch enough TV or movies to know if she is current. I enjoyed her on 'Nash Bridges'. What does she speak?

Who is Salma Hayek?

[af_vet_1981]

After she brought the alleged breaches to the attention of her supervisors, Edmonds was fired by the FBI. Her termination letter does not state a reason. Edmonds filed a lawsuit, but Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller got a federal judge to block it by asserting the extremely rare claim of "State Secret Privilege."

President Bush is responsible now. We can't blame Clinton for this now.

[Doctor Stochastic]

WND does seem to have lots of single-source stories.

[Montfort]

An important point is that it is a LOT easier to learn a foreign language well enough to translate it accurately into one's native language than to become so fluent that one can speak, write, and listen as well as a native speaker.

This would vary according to the language and the particular person's strenghths, of course. I probably could have gotten to the where I could have translated Spanish literature into English for a living long before I would have ever been able to pass myself off as a native speaker. Chinese would be much harder to get good at translating.

[Cronos]

I really don't know if either of them speak Arabic but I do know that they are Arabic in origin. Salma Hayek is a Mexican-Arab actress that acted in quite a few movies including Desperado, and others.