ABC News yesterday broke a whistleblower report that US army interpreters deployed in Afghanistan often don’t speak the local languages. ABC News reports that up to a quarter of the interpreters hired by a private provider, Mission Essential Personnel, failed basic language tests.
Click on the picture, to watch one such interpreting episode unfold: a Pashto-speaking villager in effect offers to cooperate with US troops but the interpreter makes up an entirely different scenario with the Americans eventually walking away and cursing the villager. No wonder they don’t get anywhere winning the hearts and minds of the locals!
A Christian Science Monitor report has some examples of the damage caused by incompetent interpreters: in one case, misinterpreted directions resulted in a misdirected mortar attack on the wrong spot. The entire livestock of a village was killed in that attack; US troops paid compensation to the villagers. In another example, a request for shooting illumination flares was misinterpreted as a request for a mortar attack, which resulted in an unspecified number of casualties.
The reasons for these disasters are manifold: to begin with, war interpreting is a lucrative business both for the interpreters on the ground but even more so for corporations such as Mission Essential Personnel. Second, Afghanistan is a multilingual country and apparently someone hired as a Dari interpreter may well be then assigned to interpret in a Pashto- or Baluchi-speaking part of the country. Third, army interpreters are often uneducated and inexperienced young men as the more senior interpreters opt for more secure employment with the UN or NGOs in Kabul. One of the interpreters interviewed for the Christian Science Monitor report, for instance, tells how he learnt English by selling cigarettes to soldiers outside Bagram Airbase. He was only 16 when someone asked him whether he spoke Dari and Pashto. He said “yes” and, voila, he had a new job as army interpreter.
Would anyone have given him a job as, say, an accountant? “Hey, are you good at maths?” “Yes!” “Beaut! I’ve got a job for you as an army account.” Wouldn’t happen because everyone understands the need for accountants to be properly trained, qualified and to have substantial experience for a high-stakes role. By contrast, decision makers in the US army are seemingly so naive about language and communication skills that they think nothing of putting the lives of civilians and soldiers, indeed the entire outcome of the operation, into the hands of untrained, unqualified and inexperienced interpreters. Just another reason to Rethink Afghanistan!
such disasters happened only becoze of not kowing a lg perfectly????:( whose fault is it? i do agree with kimie, it puts every one at risk.:((
Very nice…
By the way, when I click on the clip to open, an empty page opens, instead!!!
This is the link:
Thank you very much for the link and putting the longer version…
The video clip left me utterly speechless for a good few minutes. I’m shocked to learn all these problems arising from the lack of competent translators. It puts everyone, the troops, villagers and the translators, at great risk. When “misunderstandings” that have occurred due to translation problems and their consequences during the past wartimes often go unnoticed for a long time (such as the translator’s error between General MacArthur and the Japanese Government http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=1705), your report is so valuable.