By John Freivalds

Managing Director
JFA Marketing

Download our List of 6,000+ Translation Agencies!
No Recurring Membership Fees!

Advertisements:

John Freivalds cautions that the U.S. is losing one of the major battles in the war on terror because it doesn’t understand that it’s really a “war of words.” This is perhaps to be expected in a culture that doesn’t recognize the intricacies of its own language, with many assuming that English just “is,” like air or water. Freivalds reminds us of the value of free-floating neurons and “guerrilla linguistics” and then outlines some concrete steps that readers can take to combat the ignorance. Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article was published in a local Roanoke, Virginia (U.S.) newspaper.

John Freivalds “Don’t submit interrogatories about how your political unit may provide goods and services to your person, but submit an interrogatory on how you may offer goods and services to your political unit.” What’s this? It’s a beyond stilted rendering of John F. Kennedy’s famous exhortation, “Don’t ask what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

The stilted version doesn’t much inspire us to do anything; rather, it makes us wonder what is being said and gives us reason to question the competence of the person saying it. Recently, J. Paul Bremmer, our guy running things in Iraq, gave a Ramadan speech (Ramadan is the holy month of fasting for Muslims and a big deal). However, he had his speech translated in a literal and, as a result, in a similar clunky manner. The justification according to a Bremmer spokesperson was, “The Arabic is not always literary or stylistically perfect, but it conveys the exact content and tone of the English…” But an Arabic-speaking expert said that in translating the text in this stilted way, the reader is deprived of the eloquence and meaning of what is being said.

We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

The war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq are “wars of words.”

This attitude highlights one of the major battles we are losing in the war on terror: the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq are “wars of words.” America’s aversion to other languages is costing us the edge we need to win. We don’t even know what we don’t know about languages. The root causes are many: the misguided belief that everyone speaks English; our looking down on people who don’t speak English (at all or well) and misguided trust in those who do; our cutting back on foreign language instruction and requirements, both in K -12 and at universities. Winning the war on words means we could gather better intelligence, make ourselves better understood and appear to be less arrogant.

The “everyone speaks English” argument goes something like this: 25% of the world’s population speaks English, including most of the people who matter. So why bother? Well, that means 75% of the world’s population doesn’t speak English. And Osama Bin Laden isn’t speaking English and neither are the people around him. So, how can we possibly know what they are thinking? Winning a war means your information is better than the other guy’s.

Guerrilla Linguistics

Guerilla linguistics: learning enough key words and phrases to get by and to confuse the other guy.

We have a Defense Language Institute. However, one difficulty with the Defense Language Institute is its academic pace. Its programs are a year or eighteen months in duration. This is too long. My tour in the Peace Corps showed me that in three months one can be fluent enough to get by. Some U.S. businesses have adopted a program of “guerilla linguistics”: simply learning enough key words and phrases to get by and to confuse the other guy; making him think you know more than you really do about his language and culture. This works. I learned enough via this method to more than get by in the extended work I did in Iran and Afghanistan.

Language learning isn’t high up in the Defense Department’s priorities. The latter is mired in concepts of traditional warfare; namely, kill the enemy as efficiently as possible. Under that scenario, why bother learning another language? But in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are acting as policemen and caregivers, so language is essential. Can you imagine a beat cop in the U.S. being successful without knowing the language of the street? We have 6,000 some soldiers in Bosnia, as well. They were not even given a “guerilla linguistics” lesson on how to say, “Stop” or “Where are the bad guys?” before being thrown into that cauldron of hate.

We have 20-year-olds patrolling Iraq totally deaf to what is going on. One of our generals in Iraq said we don’t need more troops, rather more information. So, why aren’t we doing more? Are any of the soldiers we plan to send to Iraq in May receiving intensive language training?

Free-floating Neurons

We should stockpile language skills in the same way we stockpile weapons.

Actually, teaching languages to a 20-year-old is really too late. The time to teach languages is before puberty. Philologists tell us that we have “free-floating neurons” in our brain before puberty that enable us to learn an “infinite “ number of languages. That is why immersion progams are immensely useful and central to our country’s defense. We should stockpile language skills in the same way we stockpile weapons. Russia isn’t perceived as a threat anymore, and there has been a 50% drop in Russian language learning.

It’s not that we haven’t tried. The National Defense Education Act of 1958, the National Security Education Act of 1991, and the Presidential Commission of Foreign Languages and International Studies in 1979 (which called the “lack of languages skills scandalous”) have all tried to call public attention to the problem. But since 1967, the U.S. Government has been spending 25% less (adjusted for inflation) for high-level language training.

We seem to have a “just-in-time” attitude towards languages. When something bad happens, we then decide it is time to figure out the language issue. But events are moving too fast to afford the luxury of this approach. We are involved in a war in Afghanistan where the U.S. and its partners are trying to dissolve a foreign force (Osama Bin Laden and his Saudi Arabs who speak Arabic), defeat a faction (the Taliban, who speak primarily Pashton), strengthen another faction (that speaks Uzbek, Tajik and Dari), manage a coalition (that speaks Urdu, Tajik, Turkmen, German, Turkish, Russian and British English), and then rebuild a country that can get along with its neighbors (where they also speak Farsi, Chinese and Turkish).

Late information is no information; it is ancient history.

And that’s just in Afghanistan. Newsweek reports in its Oct. 27th issue that hundreds of hours of wiretaps go untranslated because there are not enough translators to do the job. And late information is no information; it is ancient history.

Cutbacks in Language Instruction

I have a theory that many Americans don’t know that English is a language.

But what are we doing? We are cutting back on language instruction. According to a spokesperson for the Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, the cuts in language learning are the steepest in twenty years. O.K., few public schools teach Arabic, but if you know one foreign language, it’s easier to learn others. I have a theory that many Americans don’t know that English is a language. It just “is,” like air or water. And when you don’t recognize the intricacies of your own language, how can you begin to understand the intricacies of another? Go back to the literal translation of Bremmer’s speech I mentioned earlier.

The arrogance of American English causes us another problem in foreign affairs. We are far too trusting of foreigners who speak English fluently and not trusting enough of those who speak it poorly or not at all. During the Iran hostage crisis many years ago, we relied on English-speaking Iranians to help us free the hostages. During the current war in Iraq, we have relied almost exclusively on Ahmed Chalabi, a fluent, English-speaking Iraqi who has lived in London for the last thirty years. It was Chalabi and his British English who waxed poetically that Saddam was done and that there would be a popular uprising and mass defection, once we invaded. Did anyone bother to interview cab drivers, bazaar merchants or street peddlers? Nope. And now we are paying the price.

While the foreign policy and military establishments are far behind in using languages as a strategic tool, America’s business culture senses an opportunity to use and translate other languages. United Airlines, in an effort to improve customer service, wants all of its 10,000 or so flight attendants to speak other languages. Microsoft spends more on localization than any other company in the world and is going to all lengths to make sure its software is available in as many languages as possible. It recently localized its Office XP into Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonain at a cost of several million dollars.

Where Do We Go From Here?

There are several things we can do.

If someone’s English puts you at ease, you are talking to the wrong guy.

Start at the top. Demand that our leaders push for foreign language instruction and use throughout our defense structure.
Present the knowledge of other languages as a strategic asset. Our political leaders usually drag out their few words of Spanish in an election year. Beyond that, they do little. JFK was the last President who made a concerted effort to speak other languages; he wanted to be able to negotiate in French with Charles DeGaulle.
Provide incentives in the military and Foreign Service to those who learn a language. Too expensive? How much is it worth to be able to ask a native, “Have you seen anything suspicious around here?” and receive a response that allows the prevention of a terrorist tragedy?
Fund and require language learning at all levels of education. The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world (and possibly the only one) where you can earn a PhD without knowing another language.
Judge people’s insight not by how well they speak English, but by their ability to capture another’s culture. If someone’s English puts you at ease, you are talking to the wrong guy.
Borrow insights from the private sector as to how to implement language learning, translation programs and technologies. Organizations such as ACTFL (American Council for the Teaching of Foreign Languages, the Airline Language Council, LISA, and the hundreds of companies that comprise these organizations, have the connections and skills that our defense needs.

John Freivalds is Managing Director of JFA and publisher of The Periodic Tables of Languages, Money, First Class & Toasts. He is also the author of Money Talks, the popular column that appears quarterly in the Globalization Insider. Freivalds can be reached at jfa_DELETE THIS_@direcway.com.

Reprinted by permission from the Globalization Insider,
17 June 2004, Volume XIII, Issue 2.3.
Copyright the Localization Industry Standards Association
(Globalization Insider: www.localization.org, LISA: www.lisa.org)
and S.M.P. Marketing Sarl (SMP) 2004

Winning the War of Words

We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

Guerrilla Linguistics

Free-floating Neurons

Cutbacks in Language Instruction

Where Do We Go From Here?