Magazine

Lost In Translation

May 1, 2002

Deputy Editor

It is impossible to know the full extent to which a lack of language expertise hurts American interests. The Office of Personnel Management doesn't maintain comprehensive records of the number of federal employees with foreign language skills, or the number of positions that require such skills. OPM's records indicate that the government employs fewer than 1,000 translators and interpreters-a specially designated job series in the federal workforce. But tens of thousands of additional positions across government require language skills. In many cases, the problems agencies have with hiring and keeping personnel with language skills stem from deeper management challenges. For example, budget cuts at the State Department throughout the 1990s left the Foreign Service with about 1,100 vacancies by the time Secretary of State Colin Powell took office in January 2001. "These are positions that existed that we had no bodies to fill," says John Naland, president of the American Foreign Service Association. "The people we did have had to be rushed to post. In a lot of cases language training had to be shortened or not provided at all. That's a huge problem and a legacy of the lack of hiring in the 1990s." One of the first things Powell did was request an increase in resources, in both staffing and operating funds, to fill the personnel deficit and hire enough extra Foreign Service officers over the next three years to maintain a "training float"-a reserve of employees assumed to be in training at any given time. If Congress continues to fund the plan, "We'll be able to put someone in two years of Arabic training or Chinese training and there won't be a vacancy in Cairo or Beijing while they're in training," Naland says. But even if State and other agencies were fully staffed, they wouldn't necessarily have enough people with the right skills to meet their language requirements. Advances in technology and wider access to foreign language publications have tremendously increased the need for employees who can read and understand non-English materials. Military deployments in recent years have revealed shortages of personnel skilled in languages few Defense planners anticipated needing. When U.S. troops were deployed to Somalia in 1992, for instance, the Defense Department found itself desperately seeking hundreds of Somali interpreters. Many had to be recruited from the ranks of new immigrants found driving taxi cabs in New York and Washington. The current deployment to Afghanistan is presenting similar challenges. The languages of Afghanistan include Pashto, Dari, Azgari, Uzbek, Turkmen, Berberi, Aimaq and Baluchi-languages few Americans even recognize, let alone speak. The war on terrorism virtually ensures that U.S. troops will be operating in regions where language skills will be in short supply. Most of the attention on language skills shortfalls has centered on Arabic and languages used in and around Afghanistan, but just as worrisome for Defense officials is the shortage of personnel with language and regional expertise in Asia.

A critical shortage of federal employees with foreign language skills is hurting national security.

hen then-CIA field agent Robert Baer served in Tajikistan in the early 1990s, he saw a golden opportunity to collect information that might prove vital to U.S. interests. Thousands of refugees were pouring into Tajikistan from Afghanistan, where civil war was raging. The refugees represented a gold mine of intelligence from a nation at the crossroads of American interests in the region. But Baer, who spoke Arabic and Russian, didn't speak Dari or Pashto, the languages predominant among the refugees. So he contacted CIA headquarters and asked the agency to send Dari and Pashto speakers to debrief the refugees. The CIA couldn't-there weren't any, according to Baer. The refugees continued to come, and the United States missed an opportunity to get a life-saving glimpse into the brewing threat of radical Islam in Afghanistan.

Baer related his experiences in See No Evil (Crown Publishers, 2002), his memoir of a 21-year career in the CIA. During his two decades of service, the agency grew increasingly reliant on satellite technology and electronic intelligence-gathering at the expense of maintaining the language skills and regional expertise of its field officers. When Baer was transferred out of Tajikistan in 1992, his replacement spoke neither Tajik nor Russian, essentially crippling the agency's human intelligence-gathering efforts there, an assessment confirmed by another U.S. government official who served in Tajikistan at the time.

Baer's experience is hardly unique. Across government, countless opportunities are squandered every day for want of personnel who speak and understand foreign languages. While Baer was lamenting the CIA's lack of people with language skills in Central Asia, the FBI was sitting on its own gold mine of information back in New York-if only the agency had had the eyes and ears to recognize it. Only after terrorists bombed the World Trade Center in February 1993, did agents go back and translate previously taped phone conversations and confiscated documents, all in Arabic, that offered vital clues to the bombing. But the FBI missed those clues because it didn't have enough translators to get through the material when it might have been useful in preventing an attack, instead of understanding the attack after the fact.

More than 70 federal agencies require employees with foreign language skills, which are vital to national defense, law enforcement and economic security. In March, Susan Westin, managing director of international affairs and trade issues for the General Accounting Office, told the Senate Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on International Security, Proliferation and Federal Services that shortages of language-qualified personnel have hindered operations in a range of areas:

The Army doesn't have enough linguists to support its current war plans or meet intelligence-gathering requirements.
Intelligence agencies lack the staff to translate and interpret thousands of technical papers that detail foreign research and development in scientific and technical areas.
Without more timely translation of Spanish conversations, the assistant U.S. attorney in Miami in charge of health care fraud investigations soon will have to turn away cases. The implications are significant: Medicare and Medi- caid losses in the region top $3 billion.
The FBI holds thousands of hours of audiotapes and pages of written material that never have been reviewed or translated because the agency lacks qualified linguists. FBI officials told GAO the situation has hindered criminal prosecutions and limited the agency's ability to arrest and convict violent gang members.
Lack of proficiency in foreign languages among State Department personnel has hindered diplomatic readiness, resulting in ineffective representation and advocacy of U.S. interests abroad, lost exports and foreign investments, and lost opportunities combating international terrorism and drug trafficking.

Poor Planning

In January, GAO reported in "Foreign Languages: Human Capital Approach Needed to Correct Staffing and Proficiency Shortfalls" that the lack of competence in foreign languages has hindered U.S. commercial interests, military operations, diplomacy, law enforcement, intelligence operations and counter-terrorism efforts (GAO-02-375). To assess the situation broadly, GAO auditors reviewed operations at four agencies where language skills are critical: the State Department, the FBI, the Army, and the Foreign Commercial Service, which is part of the Commerce Department.

The Army, State Department and FBI all reported significant shortages in translators and interpreters, positions that tend to require the highest levels of skills. The Army reported, on average, a 44 percent shortfall in translators and interpreters in five critical languages-Arabic, Korean, Mandarin-Chinese, Persian-Farsi and Russian. The State Department had a 26 percent shortfall in authorized translator and interpreter positions, and the FBI had a 13 percent shortfall. (The Foreign Commercial Service does not have designated translator and interpreter positions, but hires locally for those jobs.)

All four agencies reported shortages in other positions requiring language skills:

The Army has about 15,000 positions requiring proficiency in 62 languages. Last year the service had 142 unfilled positions for cryptologic linguists in Korean and Mandarin Chinese, and 108 unfilled positions for human intelligence collectors in Arabic, Russian, Spanish, Korean and Mandarin Chinese.
The State Department has 2,581 positions requiring some foreign language proficiency spanning 64 languages. State has acknowledged its lack of Foreign Service officers who meet language requirements, but it doesn't have reliable data to show the extent of the problem-two different agency reports put the shortfalls at 50 percent and 16 percent.
The Foreign Commercial Service had significant shortfalls, 55 percent overall, in staff with the required proficiency in Mandarin-Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Indonesian, Korean and Turkish.
The FBI had 1,792 special agents with skills in 40 languages, adding tremendously to the agency's ability to interview suspects and develop connections with informants. However, the FBI does not set staffing goals for special agents with foreign language skills, making it impossible to determine shortfalls.

Of the four agencies that GAO focused on, only the FBI has a staffing plan that links its foreign language program to its strategic objectives and program goals. GAO found that the FBI plan identified strategies, performance measures, responsible parties and resources the bureau needs to fill its language deficit. None of the other agencies had a comprehensive strategy for resolving shortages.

No Easy Solutions

It's a problem that's become familiar to the faculty at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., the largest language school in the world and the source of 85 percent of language training for government personnel, primarily Defense. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, U.S. military language requirements have expanded dramatically, and the DLI has responded. Unlike colleges and universities, the DLI produces students with the skills the Defense Department and military services demand.

"We don't put out a class list and then hope people will enroll," says DLI Chancellor Ray Clifford. "The enrollments take place first. As enrollments shift, we adjust our faculty and teaching strength."

Last year, 2,083 students graduated from basic language training in 20 languages. Depending on the difficulty of the language, training lasts from 25 weeks to 63. In 2001, more than half of DLI students were enrolled in four of the toughest languages for Americans to learn: Arabic, Chinese-Mandarin, Korean and Persian-Farsi. (Several hundred more students completed intermediate and advanced training as well.)

Neil Granoien, a former Russian instructor and former dean of the DLI's Korean school, now oversees a special task force to provide support to Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. The DLI recently has added new courses in Pashto, Dari and Uzbek, and plans to add courses in Basha Indonesian, Urdu and Turkic languages.

There are considerable challenges in creating language courses for some of the more obscure languages now needed, says Granoien. In many cases, instructors must first develop grammar where none exists. "People have been writing Spanish grammar for a couple hundred years, French even longer. If you take a language like Uzbek, there's much work to be done, or [Pashto], for example, where there's very little work that's been done, and most of that was done in Victoria's reign." That's Queen Victoria, who ruled Britain from 1837 to 1901, when the British controlled much of the area that is now Afghanistan.

"We've got considerable expertise in the applied linguistics area so we're able to [develop the grammar], but it's not something that happens overnight and it's not something you pull off a shelf," Granoien says.

Finding enough qualified instructors is another major challenge. "The faculty we need to find are not being produced for us by U.S. colleges and universities," says Clifford. Ideally, instructors will be qualified teachers as well as native speakers able to function linguistically at a professional level. Typically, the Defense Language Institute recruits foreign students doing graduate work in the United States in the field of teaching English as a second language, but the institute can't find instructors for some of the more obscure languages for which the school is now recruiting. Granoien recently found four Turkmen instructors through a friend who was traveling in Turkmenistan. The DLI has found a few other instructors through contacts with South Asian relief agencies.

Once faculty are recruited and trained-the DLI has a one-month intensive training program for native speakers with little or no teaching experience-building a curriculum and developing testing programs is another challenge. The language programs are based on real-world instruction, making it difficult to teach languages that are rarely published in newspapers, magazines and the like.

The DLI is accredited, and students completing the intensive basic program in any language receive 45 semester hours of college credit. To successfully complete the program, students must pass a battery of tests that measure their proficiency in speaking, reading and listening. Proficiency levels range from Level 1 (elementary), in which an individual can speak well enough to get his or her basic needs met and demonstrate common courtesy, to Level 5 (functionally native), in which an individual has the proficiency of an articulate, well-educated native speaker.

The institute's basic training program is designed to get students to Level 2 (limited working ability), in which they can handle routine social demands and deal with concrete topics in the past, present and future tenses. "It doesn't enable them to go on to hypothetical areas or be able to read between the lines," Granoien says. To achieve proficiency at Levels 3 and 4, the general and advanced professional levels, students generally need practical experience, he says.

The school also maintains an extensive field program, and develops programs to meet the specific needs of military personnel in the field. Last year, the DLI provided 20,000 hours of instruction in far-flung locations, broadcast from the Monterey campus. Long-standing Problems

In a recent study of the Defense Department's preparedness for dealing with emerging security issues in Asia, researchers at DFI International, a Washington research and consulting firm, found that language training outside the intelligence field was a low priority in the military services, mainly because of limited resources. Compounding the problem is the absence of a Defense strategy for identifying critical language requirements and providing top-down guidance to the services on meeting those needs. Instead, each service independently defines its language requirements and determines its policy for rewarding language skills with bonus pay. The payments generally are not high enough to provide troops with sufficient incentive for the difficult task of maintaining language skills. Also, most services don't differentiate between critical languages in which the services are experiencing shortages, and those more commonly spoken, such as Spanish and French.

Only the Army has embraced the concept of training regional specialists. Through its career-track Foreign Area Officer Program, officers develop regional expertise and language skills. DFI noted that the Air Force and Navy FAO programs are underdeveloped and ineffective, which is of particular concern in Asia, where those services predominate.

In its final report Sept. 30, "Focusing the Department of Defense on Asia," DFI also noted that only a small percentage of regional policy positions at the U.S. Pacific Command were filled with qualified personnel. Navy and Air Force regional headquarters offices each have five "country desk" billets in their policy and planning directorates, but "only one of the five incumbent officers in these billets has any regional experience or expertise." The Marine Corps had only a single desk officer for the entire Asia-Pacific area. "As security challenges in the Asia-Pacific theater rise, so do intelligence requirements. However, a shortfall of properly trained analysts and Asian linguists is creating backlogs in the analysis of gathered [intelligence]," according to the DFI report. "China poses a particular problem: Officials at the Joint Intelligence Center Pacific noted that, even if they dedicated all of their all-source intelligence analysts to China, they would still not have enough analysts to handle China intel/analytical requirements alone."

The shortage of language-qualified personnel in government and its harmful effects on national security are not new-nor is concern about language deficits. DLI's Clifford says the United States has a long history of ambivalence about the value of foreign languages: In 1923, the U.S. Supreme Court had to overturn laws restricting the teaching of foreign languages in 22 states. In 1940, a national report on high schools determined that "overly academic" programs were causing too many students to fail. The report recommended eliminating foreign language instruction. By the late 1950s, however, concern about being outpaced by the Soviet Union resulted in the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which, among other things, was designed to produce more foreign language teachers and programs. But enthusiasm was short-lived. The 1979 Presidential Commission on Foreign Language and International Studies found that "Americans' incompetence in foreign languages is nothing short of scandalous, and it is becoming worse."

In many ways, the problems of federal agencies with recruiting and training language-competent employees reflect the failure of our public education system. According to data compiled by the Center for Applied Linguistics, the vast majority of elementary schools don't teach foreign languages, and while 86 percent of high schools offer foreign languages, few high schools offer instruction in languages beyond Spanish or French. According to 1998 survey data from the Modern Language Association, a New York-based professional group, about 8 percent of college students are enrolled in foreign language classes. And as anyone who has studied a language in high school or college knows, taking classes does not necessarily result in proficiency.

"To build the kind of expertise the government needs in intelligence and defense and economics, we have to recognize that language learning is long-term, serious and difficult," David Edwards, executive director for the Joint National Committee for Languages, said at a January briefing on language and national security sponsored by the National Foreign Language Center and the National Security Education Program.

"As most other nations of the world already know, we have to begin the process in the elementary schools and continue it the whole way through graduate school if we're to do it well," Edwards said.

"We cannot address the government's language needs without addressing the nation's language needs," Edwards added.

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