A DEPRESSING tale from ABC News’s investigative unit: a former employee of a contractor that provides translators for America’s army in Afghanistan says that the forces are being had by fraudulently incompetent workers. The contractor, Mission Essential Personnel, strongly denies the accusations and says that the whistleblower is trying to influence an ongoing court case. The whistleblower claims that translators are hiring stand-ins to pass over-the-phone exams in Pushtu, the main language of the Taliban and Afghanistan’s south. (Dari, a variety of Persian, is also spoken in Afghanistan and mentioned in the ABC report, but the real critical need is for Pushtu.) The follow-up written exams are similarly described as “bull”. The motivation is money: over $200,000 a year for a “skilled” interpreter.

MEP, the contractor, would not (even if the allegations are true) be at all the sole source of the problem. American training of its own personnel in critical languages remains under-done, years after numerous reports by America’s own watchdogs have found terrifying shortages. Yes, Pushtu is a hard language for Americans to learn, as are Arabic and Persian/Dari.  They are spoken in a wide variety of dialects by often illiterate people who won’t speak like the model speakers back in the classroom. Speaking those languages well requires a cultural knowledge that is also hard to pick up. (Many niceties are needed to speak Arabic properly, for example. You can easily give minor offence if you don’t respond properly to “may your hands be blessed” with the required “and also your hands”. )  But the problems go beyond that; ABC reports translations that are not even close, and in some cases do more harm than good. Local hires, meanwhile, are no easy fix: they are hard to vet, in terms of both their loyalty and their skill.  Read more.

See: The Economist

Also see: Lack of qualified interpreters in the military unveiled