{"id":1284,"date":"2017-08-11T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2017-08-11T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwordmuseum.org\/language-and-national-security-q-a-with-bill-rivers\/"},"modified":"2023-08-25T13:27:12","modified_gmt":"2023-08-25T17:27:12","slug":"language-and-national-security-q-a-with-bill-rivers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwordmuseum.org\/language-and-national-security-q-a-with-bill-rivers\/","title":{"rendered":"Language and National Security: Q&A with Bill Rivers"},"content":{"rendered":"

In today\u2019s increasingly global world, collaboration can come from anywhere \u2014 and so can national security threats. The United States\u2019 national defense agencies have to be prepared to deal with foreign intelligence, security threats, and diplomatic relations in a variety of languages, which increases demand for language skills across the board. Bill Rivers, a Planet Word Advisory Board member and the executive director of the Joint National Committee for Languages, weighs in on how national defense agencies handle these language challenges, how they\u2019ve changed, and where they\u2019re headed next.<\/p>\n

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The levels of proficiency as dictated by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Q: What role does language play in national security?<\/h4>\n

A: <\/strong>Language has been a critical element of national security since World War II. For most of the past half century, language requirements reflected the bilateral world \u2014 since the primary adversary of the US was the USSR, Russian was the most important language to learn (and, to a lesser extent, the languages of the Eastern Bloc). Of course, languages such as Korean and Vietnamese saw greater requirements during those conflicts, and our diplomatic engagements demanded a wide range of languages, as they covered essentially every country.<\/p>\n

The last two decades have drastically altered that environment, as our national defense strategy was forced to account for uncertainty and unpredictability in international relations beyond the traditional focus on specific threats from specific countries. This has led to significantly heightened requirements for language in national security. The worldwide scope of defense, intelligence, homeland security, and diplomatic responsibilities means that more languages are needed, and more folks speaking and using them \u2014 and for more missions, such as cybersecurity, special forces, and counterinsurgency. Finally, the level of proficiency required for most of these missions is now at the \u201c3\u201d or \u201cSuperior\u201d level \u2014 which is a full level higher than a generation ago.<\/p>\n

Q: What languages are particularly in demand?<\/h4>\n

A: <\/strong>One can read the newspaper and see that we have engagements all over the world: the Middle East, Southwest Asia,\u00a0China, the Korean Peninsula, Russia. There\u2019s a growth of Islamic fundamentalism in parts of sub-Saharan Africa that\u2019s driving a demand in the federal government for those languages. Trade with Africa is driving a demand for African languages. In the mid-term, unless the geopolitical situation changes or calms down considerably, we\u2019ll probably continue to see demand for Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Farsi, and Korean. Again, read the nearest papers or look at a map and you\u2019ll see where the key languages are.<\/p>\n

The Critical Language Scholarship program of the State Department currently lists Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Azeri, Russian, Turkish, Arabic, Bangla, Hindi, Persian, Punjabi, Urdu, and Swahili as key languages. The National Security Education Program lists 50 languages. Each agency determines which languages are critical.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Graphic from a 2015 Politico article showing the concentration of US military bases abroad.<\/p><\/div>\n

Q: What languages do you think will gain significance in the future?<\/h4>\n

A: <\/strong>Long-term it\u2019s harder to say. A lot of us thought after the Cold War ended that we\u2019d see a reduction in overall military intelligence requirements, and it turned out that that was completely off.<\/p>\n

Things happen suddenly. When the Balkans fell apart, we were unprepared linguistically. We scrambled to retrain Russian-speaking personnel in Serbo-Croatian. Somali was a real challenge \u2014 at the time, there was a very small Somali-American community. Pashto was a challenge because, again, there\u2019s not a big community in the US. Often for the really small languages there\u2019s only a handful of scholars.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s very hard to predict where trouble will occur. I\u2019m sure at some point we\u2019re going to need some language we\u2019re not necessarily well-prepared for.<\/p>\n

Q: How has the translation process changed since you were a translator and interpreter?<\/h4>\n

A: <\/strong>I started in 1989 when I was an undergraduate. The hardest thing was I had no formal training or preparation and didn\u2019t realize that there was such a thing. And I think a lot of Americans who are learning languages or who are bilingual, however they acquired their language knowledge, may not realize there are methods for translation and interpreting that make your life a lot easier. There are special note-taking techniques, for example, for consecutive interpreting (where the interpreter waits for the speaker to finish his or her entire statement before translating) as opposed to simultaneous interpreting (where the interpreter and the speaker talk at the same time). I had no idea about the use of terminology databases, translation memories \u2014 databases of phrases, sentences, and language fragments that have been previously translated \u2014 and things that were in their very earliest stages and really weren\u2019t broadly available when I was starting. My terminology \u201cdatabase\u201d was a three-ring binder that I kept terms and definitions in. I had a couple bookshelves full of dictionaries I\u2019d acquired over a ten- or fifteen-year period that are mostly obsolete now.<\/p>\n

Translation is completely different nowadays \u2014 it\u2019s all done on a computer screen using web- and cloud-based tools for the most part, even in fairly low-density pairs (language pairs that are less frequently translated). If you\u2019re working on a large translation project, you may be one of a very large team of people all over the world, working on one discrete part of the project, and have other people trying to put it together. That\u2019s really different from translating treaty documents and agreements 25 years ago, where you would write it out longhand and someone else would type it up.<\/p>\n