Never Lost in Translation
Written by J.B. Bissell
MAE 2011 Volume: 6 Issue: 2 (March)
When it comes to foreign languages, common wisdom stresses the value of learning three crucial phrases: “Hello, how are you?” “Thank you.” “Where’s the nearest restroom?” If you know those, you present yourself as somebody who is friendly and polite, and perhaps even calm under a certain amount of pressure. Of course, that little tidbit of wisdom really only applies to speaking a foreign language while things are relatively relaxed on a family vacation.
“The differences between traveling or our corporate clients and when we do language training for soldiers is that it’s literally to keep them alive,” said Christopher Ekvall, director of government sales for Berlitz, the renowned language institute with more than 500 training facilities in 70 countries as well as comprehensive online learning options. “It’s a life or death issue, rather than being able to function better in a new environment.”
That’s the bottom line when it comes to language training for the military. That’s why it’s so important. That’s why there’s never been more of a push for American soldiers (and Americans in general, for that matter) to broaden their verbal communication abilities.
“Language and culture training is a critical enabler for mission success,” confirmed Colonel Danial D. Pick, commandant of the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center in Monterey, Calif. “We operate in an international environment in which we need to build partnership capacity amongst coalition partners and allies, whether that be in Europe or Africa or in the Middle East or Asia, and building partnership capacity requires understanding the culture and speaking the language of the host nation force you’re trying to work with.”
Being able to efficiently and effectively work together is one of the primary motivators for language expertise. But working together doesn’t always take place on the battlefield. “When natural disasters occur, such as they did fairly recently in Haiti and South America with the earthquakes, U.S. military forces are part of the recovery operation,” Pick continued. “Besides fresh water, health care, shelter and other essential resources, we also bring language and culture capability, which is critical for humanitarian relief operations.
“The impact of an American serviceman or woman who speaks the tongue and understands the culture of a person in need is profound. You see it everywhere, whether it’s in Helmand Province in Afghanistan or in Haiti or in other countries around the globe. There is absolutely no substitute for seeing the world through your partner’s eyes.”
Through The World’s Eyes
Unfortunately, there is also no easy path to language proficiency, and the instruction can be just as intense, at least mentally, as other combat training. “We’ve done some work down in southern Virginia at Little Creek,” Ekvall said. “We get 20, 21-year-old Marines, 20 to 40 of them in a room, and they’ve got 40 hours before they deploy to get some rudimentary Arabic or Pashto skills, depending on where they’re going, along with some basic cultural information.
“It can be a little overwhelming, but the beauty is that in our situation, even with larger groups, we’re attempting to be interactive and bring them information that’s totally relevant to their situation. We’re giving them key language skills—how to meet and greet and work with the vocabulary they need—and on the culture side, we’re introducing some really fundamental issues to level their clarity and increase their understanding of the region.”
This attention to the cultural portion of linguistics— being able to recognize the differences between various religious sects, for example—is a relatively new point of emphasis, but educators are quickly finding that it’s at least as important, if not more so, than being able to simply say “hello” in Korean.
“In the past, we typically did 99 percent language training for our armed forces partners,” continued Ekvall. “It used to be referred to as the ‘little C, big L’: a little culture and a big language component. Now, for pre-deployment trainings, everybody is starting to understand that the cultural aspect—especially given the time they have to learn—is in many cases more important. So the paradigm is shifting; we’re giving them sort of a ‘big C, little L.’”
The theory is that “when they leave the room, even if they only get one thing after 40 hours, that’s one more thing that might help keep them alive overseas.”
Beyond The Basics
While mastering the basics can certainly help diffuse potentially disastrous spur-of-the-moment situations in the field, there is actually a wide range of promising long-term career opportunities for soldiers who have an interest in pushing beyond the essentials and becoming professional linguists in the military.
“The immediate payoff is that you increase your ability to accomplish your mission,” Pick said. But language education opens your mind and “makes you more adaptable when you visit other cultures, even the ones you didn’t learn about initially. It gives you a broader perspective intellectually.”
It can also broaden your bank account. “The military pays a bonus for certain proficiency levels in language,” Pick explained. “Depending on your service and the language, if you achieve a certain level of proficiency you can be paid for it, and there are career fields if you’re a professional linguist in which your language capability is essential for promotion. You can have a wonderful and long career using that language and culture.”
Pick would know; he’s a perfect example. He is a product of the Defense Language Institute and a Middle East foreign area officer (FAO), which means he’s one of the go-to guys for advice on political-military procedures, cultural relations and diplomatic dealings in that region. “It’s been an amazing experience for me both in the military and personally,” he said. “Working with our embassies and our coalition partners in Iraq and Afghanistan … those are experiences I would not have been able to have, at least not in the same fullness, without the language and culture training.”
Getting Started
That training effectively begins at the local recruiter’s office, where potential soldiers can express their desire to study linguistics and then take the Defense Language Aptitude Battery test. “It measures your ability to learn a foreign language,” explained Natela A. Cutter, chief of strategic communications for the Defense Language Institute. “If they score very high, then they get to learn very difficult languages. If they score somewhere in the middle, then they take medium difficulty languages, and so on. We have four different categories.”
Spanish is considered easy and is covered in an initial 26-weeklong course. The 64-week Arabic curriculum is one of the most difficult. “After boot camp, they come here,” Cutter said. “We don’t teach anything classified; we teach language proficiency. Within a basic course, 26 to 64 weeks, depending on their language, we’re looking for students to reach a level two or higher, based on the Interagency Language Roundtable government scoring system.
“They can talk in the present, past and future tenses; they can listen and understand the news; they can take notes; and so on. Do they speak it like a native? No, that takes quite a few years to accomplish. After their course, they do specialized training somewhere else that teaches them their actual job. If they’re in the Air Force, they might end up sitting behind the pilot in the cockpit and listening in the air. If they’re an interrogator, they could end up almost anywhere.”
Then, once the soldier is working, there are a lot of maintenance courses available and “language training detachments” that allow them to not only sustain their proficiency, but also improve upon it. According to Pick, the huge advantage of the language training detachments, which basically bring the classroom to the soldier, is that “these young people are coming back from a deployment, spending a relatively short period of time at home, and then going back overseas. Rather than pulling them for a period of time of language training, we’ve opened language training detachments where they are so they can get the language and culture training necessary to redeploy without being away from their families any more than necessary.”
Foreign Areas or Bust
For the best and brightest linguists, the foreign area officer designation is a wonderful opportunity to get a comprehensive education and apply the vast amount of knowledge gained. While Colonel Pick’s Middle East FAO story is inspirational, Cutter’s lack thereof might be equally as motivational for young servicemen and women who are just getting started with their polyglot careers and considering their future prospects.
Cutter is a civilian with a profound interest in international relations and a talent with language (she speaks Serbian/Croatian, French and Italian), but she didn’t know about the opportunities to marry these passions to a military career. “Looking from the outside,” she said, “had I found out about the FAO program at a younger age, it would have been a perfect match for me.
“You apply and if you’re selected to become FAO, you get an area of expertise—the Middle East, Far East, western Europe and so on. Then you take classes to master the language, and a lot of times that’s in conjunction with going to the Naval Postgraduate School to earn a master’s degree. When you finish, you go apply it, even have the opportunity to go work in the Pentagon. These are the opportunities of a lifetime, and I wish I would have known about them.”
To that end, “We’re really trying to encourage younger people to have more knowledge about linguistics opportunities and to fully understand this option to learn language,” Cutter concluded. She’s not alone. Making sure the right people learn about the possibilities is a major focus for a number of organizations. In late 2000, the National Security Education Program piloted The Language Flagship: a project to get more people involved in linguistics schooling, specifically in verbal communication critical to national security, which includes African languages, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Urdu, Korean, Persian and Russian.
Simply put, the U.S. needs more Americans who are adept at communicating in languages other than English. The Department of Defense is a huge employer of men and women, both civilian and military, who possess these skills. There are also other types of national security positions and the entire foreign affairs community. The list goes on, and so The Language Flagship is working to address that continuing national need. Their innovative curriculum has been implemented at some 23 colleges and universities across the nation, 11 centers around the world, and even in a handful of kindergarten through 12th grade school programs.
The formula is simple: set challenging goals and find creative ways and people to meet them. “As many of us remember, our high school and college language courses did not necessarily set high expectations, nor did they really establish opportunities to reach high levels of language learning,” said Dr. Michael Nugent, director of the National Security Education Program in Arlington, Va. “This is not to say that there weren’t those rare teachers who did this. The Language Flagship has built upon those remarkable innovators and has attempted to make that type of language instruction the norm, rather than the exception.”
Which is a great thing, because our servicemen and women need to be able to do much more than say “hello” and “thank you” in Arabic. Indeed, there is both a definite need and rewarding niche for high-level linguists in today’s society. As Nugent said, “Language skills allow both military and civilian professionals a much better ability to negotiate and navigate in an increasingly globalized world. Although the military has translators and technologies to foster language understanding, a soldier on the ground with personal knowledge of the language and culture provides an unmatched resource for the U.S. armed forces.” ♦
Officers in Training Learn Chinese
At Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Prescott, Ariz. campus, students can earn a Bachelor of Science through a GSIS/Chinese degree track, which integrates the knowledge of global security and intelligence studies (GSIS) with 45 credits of Chinese. The program equips future officers with a crucial language and cultural expertise, as well as the unique knowledge of GSIS.
It also prepares students for critical thinking and analysis by providing a sound foundation in the liberal arts and sciences including history, economics, psychology, international relations, foreign policy, world geography and biology. Students also learn the nature and history of terrorism and asymmetric warfare; personality analysis and profiling; the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction; the security of the U.S. homeland; the integration of intelligence with U.S. military actions; basic security concepts and their application in a multicultural, international environment; transportation security including aviation security; the cultural, sociological and psychological dimensions of war, emergency management and forensic science applications.
The first two years of the program offers a one-hour Chinese class, followed by three months of immersion in a Chinese-speaking community, such as mainland China. Some of the upper-level Chinese courses are content courses, including IT, geography, speech, crosscultural communication, Chinese literature, Asian literature, and Eastern and Western Civilizations.
“While balancing the course load of the GSIS/Chinese program and my obligations as a ROTC cadet is challenging, it is also uniquely rewarding as it reflects the pacing and importance of the work I someday hope to do in the Air Force,” remarked an Air Force ROTC student.
About one third of the students at the Prescott campus are ROTC cadets, and many are on scholarships. Twelve military science credits are accepted as part of the GSIS/Chinese curriculum. “Chinese is one of the most rewarding classes I’ve taken in college,” said another cadet. “Not only is the language exciting to learn, but Chinese culture is unlike anything most American students get to experience.” ♦