February24, 2007:
American intelligence agencies have improved their Arab language
skills enormously since September 11, 2001 . The American FBI (Federal Bureau
of Investigation) had only about a hundred Arab linguists (many of them
marginal) back then. Six years later, the FBI has hundreds of agents with some
proficiency with Arabic, and enough linguists to translate 34,000 wiretap
messages a month. The FBI now has over 1,400 Arabic linguists, and most of
those were hired in the last year.
The
military, and CIA, have been making it difficult for the FBI to obtain Arabic
linguists, because for the military and CIA, getting more Arab linguists is a
matter of life and death. So the military and CIA offer more money and perks to
offer suitable candidates. In response, many organizations are using more
translation software ("machine translation"), plus training more of their own
people and, most importantly, getting better at finding, screening and hiring Arab-Americans
and resident foreigners with Arab language skills. This last source has
required the most ingenuity. Right after September 11, 2001, along with the
sudden need for Arab linguists, there was the fear that many of those speaking
Arabic could not be trusted. Initial screenings, using traditional methods,
found this to be largely untrue. As the years went by, the screening methods
were improved. This increased the number of applicants who were accepted. But
at times, untrustworthy people got through. There have not been many incidents
of translators passing on secrets to the enemy, and the intelligence agencies
have devoted a lot of effort to detecting any such activity. Loyalty has been
much less of a problem than more pragmatic considerations, like correctly
identifying Arabic language skills (especially when it comes to dialects and
reading comprehension). The FBI has found, for example, that its Arab
translators become even more hostile to Islamic radicalism after listening to
hours of people spewing their ethnic and religious hatred in wiretapped
conversations.
Machine
translation has been another big help. There have been major technology
advances in this area in the past few years, which was very timely. Actually,
the need for machine translation of Arabic (a very difficult language to
translate via software) has brought more money to research in this area. But
the overall improvements in machine translation has made it possible to extract
potentially useful information from vast quantities of email and phone
conversations, and turn them over to linguists for precise translation. As a
result, Islamic terrorists cannot feel so secure chatting away in Arabic
anymore.