*Edited for many typos.    

     Korean dancer in a bar speaking to Greywar (in Korean): "This guy is ugly and stupid but at least he bought me a night off."

     Greywar's nonlinguist friend : "What did she say?"

     Greywar : "She thinks you're cute."

     Lesson : Translators oftentimes have their own agendas. In the above conversation my agenda was to preserve my friend's good time and avoid conflict. Harmless in this case but not all translators agendas are quite so innocuous.

     My friends and some of my long time readers already know that I am a linguist and worked in intelligence for many years but it bears repeating for those who don't know. I have also written a bit on language and translation work as it applies to military intelligence here.

     All of this introductory prep is simply there so I can avoid rehashing the entirety of previous work while I highlight this recent article by Amir Taheri in the NY Post. In it Mr. Taheri starts with a brief anecdote: (emphasis mine)

"January 15, 2007 -- JUST outside Um al-Qasar, a port in south east Iraq, a crowd had gathered around a British armored car with a crew of four. An argument seemed to be heating up through an interpreter.

The interpreter told the Brits that the crowd was angry and wanted U.K. forces out of Iraq. But then a Kuwaiti representative of Amnesty International, accompanied by a journalist friend, approached - and found the crowd to be concerned about something quite different.

The real dispute? The day before, a British armored vehicle had an accident with a local taxi; now the cab's owner, backed by a few friends, was asking the Brits to speed up compensating him. Did these Iraqis want the Brits to leave, as the interpreter pretended? No, they shouted, a thousand times no! "

     Unfortunately this anecdote is anything but a rarity. My old unit ran into this sort of thing is a more subtle way during our stay in Balad. In a nutshell there was a local Iraqi man who was organizing work crews of other Iraqis for the base there. He was the only one who spoke English so he was the only one being dealt with directly by the office on post responsible for this action. No one in the office spoke Arabic either of course so the only person who knew what was being said on both sides was this man whom I will call "Ted".

     Ted would charge the base an amount of cash for the work being done by his crews and then disburse payment to his workers on his own. This led to Ted pocketing 80% of the day's payroll and paying his workers a pittance. This horrid situation went on for about a year with the workers growing more and more discontent with they pay they were receiving. They of course thought that the US was responsible and thought of them as slaves or something to that effect since they had no inkling of Ted's embezzlement.

     Vince Colangelo changed all that. He did speak Arabic and saw right away what the scam was as Ted had grown very bold and was completely confident that he didn't have to hide it from Americans since they were all clueless. Vince got Ted fired and dealt directly with the workers themselves. This lead to much higher wages for the workers, a background check so they could be vetted for more work, and a massive change in the workers perception of America. We went from being perceived as unfair overlords to lucrative business partners and friends within the space of a month.

     This illustrates a massive problem in the military today : The availability of skilled and reliable translation. There are very few Arabic linguists in the Army and even fewer who are any good at it. As a result US forces and other assets like reporters are at the mercy of their guides and translators from the local populace many of whom have very contradictory agendas.

     Even outside Iraq in intelligence missions involving Arabic translations this problem is rampant. Many times the translator is terribly biased one way or the other and this dramatically effects their work. I have more on this to write at a later time but I wanted to get this bit out of the way as a means of re-introducing the topic to any new readers.