US Agencies Surf for Translators

A Dearth of Linguists Sends CIA, FBI to Web

The CIA and the FBI are launching a program to help solve the shortage of linguists in Arabic and other languages, which officials say has become a crisis in the fight against terrorism. They're going online and creating a "virtual" network of bilingual university students, professors and other language experts.

When the National Virtual Translation Center starts operations Dec. 1, it will initiate an unusual and perhaps risky plan: hiring individual language speakers around the nation who haven't worked in government to translate documents and audiotapes sent to their homes or offices by e-mail.

In the past, the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA) and other agencies had to obtain security clearances for their translators and then bring them to the location of the untranslated materials -- to Afghanistan, say, to translate al Qaeda documents, or to secure vault-like U.S. government facilities where classified data could be reviewed.

(snip)

Government officials say the backlog of untranslated documents -- and of unexamined tape recordings of conversations surreptitiously recorded by the NSA -- has become so colossal that they need to try something new.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6029-2003Nov5.html

for being gay.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/news/archive/2002/11/14/national1530EST0701.DTL

Jay

but not if your gay!
Here's a hint,
Lose the fucking attitude,
then maybe you'd get some help.

N.B. Eat shit and die Ashcroft.

know what to do with it if it nibbled on their ear.

Jay

Ushbay isway ethay orstway esidentpray inway istoryhay.

(actually a branch of the CIA, but all non-classified material like Japanese articles about Japanese politicians). I did it only because I was a beginner and desperate for work. Here's why I no longer do it:

1) The pay. Less than half the going commercial rate for at-home translation of written documents.

2) Try translating Japanese off a third-generation photocopy of a newspaper article that has been shrunk to fit on 8.5 x 11 paper.

3)Their computer systems were so antiquated that I couldn't e-mail documents in. I had to modem them in, experimenting to see which protocol worked best on that day, and even then, their system garbled sometimes documents saved as DOS Text--but not consistently. (Their system couldn't handle anything later than DOS Text.) They kept insisting that I must be doing something wrong. Nope. I was composing the documents in MSWord and saving them as DOS Text every time.

I later looked into translating for the FBI--listening to tapes of conversations among yakuza or something like that. You had to fill out a security clearance form, including telling where you went to grade school and the names and addresses of people who knew you then. After all that, the FBI's hourly rate was only 60% of the going commercial rate.

If the government wants more translators, it needs to pay the going rate, offer up-to-date facilities for handling the completed translations, and not get so paranoid about security clearances.

Considering the fact that he has them looking for WMDs that everyone now admits aren't there.