I realize that a US military base in Iraq is not a dream place to live (then again, why can’t they work remotely over the internet?), but isn’t there something fundamentally wrong about paying so much money for fluent Arabic plus US citizen combination, all the more so in the ongoing down economy? Just how does this contractor industry work if that is the sort of salaries they find it necessary to pay? Why doesn’t the invisible hand of Adam Smith lead a massive rush of new entrants into this business offering cheaper services and saving Uncle Sam (and us the lowly taxpayers) some empire-building cash?
you kidding me, who wouldn’t want to do that for $145K? Or maybe for $60K? There are from one to three million Arabs living in America nowadays per Wikipedia. Do they have a 100% employment rate now or something? Or are they all so ideologically committed to oppose war in Iraq as to prefer unemployment or hourly job in small business sector to a very decently paid job in a spartan environment?
The reason they can’t work remotely is that they don’t only need to translate written materials, they’re also required to interpret on the field.
What does the compensation entail? Phrased like that, it doesn’t seem to be plain salary. Does it includes such concepts as hazard pay, are they counting “housing in military barracks” as being equivalent to “average cost of housing in the US” (as I’ve seen some companies do similar things), does it include the value of medical insurance/services (if any are provided) and the flight there (in yer very own military transport, oh yeah! - no, you’re not allowed to take it home)?
Or (more likely) it’d be too difficult for them to get the security clearances. A lot of these jobs are open to US Citizens only, and it can be really tough when you have ongoing contact with foreign nationals, especially from countries the US isn’t great buddies with.
I have a friend who was contacted for such a position. He’s from a totally unrelated country, and studied Arabic abroad on a whim. He later moved to the US and applied for US Citizenship. Moments after his new US passport arrived, he got a mysterious phone call from the US Gov. trying to get him to be a translator. He turned them down.
Why? Who wants to spend their 20s in a hellhole where everyone hates you? $145k is pretty tempting money, but you are essentially putting your entire life on hold to do something that has few if any intrinsic rewards (it’s not even great career experience- what happens to your career when Arabic speakers are no longer in demand?) How much would you accept to have lost a couple of your prime years?
Hi, I’m sitting in Iraq right now. I’m an active duty E6 Navy combat camera guy. The terps we have in our camp are about half former military and half regular civilians. Their job is dangerous enough. They ride out on our missions and are exposed to the same dangers we are. I can’t speak for terps in the other units, but ours are very fit and have no problems keeping up. From what I’ve been told a lot of applicants are weeded out the same way military applicants are. The ability to hold a clearance, fitness, health, etc. By the time it’s said and done I imagine it’s a pretty small pool of suitable candidates and then it’s all about supply and demand.
I would guess that learning a language to the required level of fluency takes some time, especially with a language like Arabic that’s heavily fragmented into dialects - ideally, you would want not just anybody speaking any Arabic dialect for such a job, you’d want someone proficient specifically in Iraqi, which further narrows down the range of choices. You can’t increase that pool of suitable candidates on the short run.
This is what I was thinking, it says basic requirement for a US citizen is speak read and write fluently. That’s just the hook in the Craigslist pond, then they start the selection procress.
why do you have to be physically on the streets of Baghdad in order to translate for the military? Why can’t the soldiers carry around an internet-connected laptop that would connect their informants to you, either through voice chat or through regular text chat, while you sit either in America or in a secure Green Zone location?
Why bother with local dialects if everybody in Iraq has watched Egyptian dramas and understands that dialect?
Also, why don’t they use local translators from one ethnicity to interview people of another ethnicity? Don’t American occupation authorities trust the Kurds? And shouldn’t they by and large trust the Shia when interrogating Sunnis, seeing that the Shia would hate the Sunni Al Qaeda and similar a lot more than they hate Americans?
**deball **ought to answer this but just ask yourself why the US military are speaking to people on the streets of Iraq? Presumably it is because they want to build relationships with local people both as a positive in itself and to build up sources of information. It is pretty obvious that remote translating through a laptop, trying to converse in a foreign dialect, or talking through a member of an opposing faction is not going to help achieve the objective.
I suspect there’s a high demand for US translators in Iraq because a lot of the Iraqi ones have been assassinated or have determined they don’t want to be. Those are some of the unsung heroes of this…thing. While US citizen translators are obviously not Iraqi, I don’t know if those who might be inclined to do translators harm would work very hard to make that distinction. IOW, could be dangerous work.
Haven’t you ever told a funny story, had it fall flat, then said, “You had to be there.” Well, it’s like that. You have to be there. That type of work is very dependent on close interpersonal interaction.
My wife is Egyptian and has a very difficult time trying to speak Arabic with a friend of ours who is Iraqi. Not everybody in Iraq understands Egyptian Arabic. Generally it is true that Egyptian Arabic is the most widely understood dialect (aside from Modern Standard Arabic), but it isn’t universally true of every individual.
Because such a setup would distort body language and make it very difficult for the interpreter to build up trust with the local; also, if videocons tend to be laggy and jumpy through cable, I don’t want to think what would it be like on a satellite link (and if there’s a big enough storm, you’re SOL). I’ve done telephone interpreting, but it was for people who had already established trust with each other and with me separatedly and who were used to teleconferences.
To interpret, the first thing I need to do is get both parties to trust me. Doing so in person is about ten million times easier than doing it when I’m a little distorted image in a laptop. And if I’m seeing only part of each person’s own distorted image, I can’t read their body language as well as if I’m there in person. When we’re talking life-or-death situations, I’d rather be there in person.
Re. dialects, the immense majority of Latin American speakers of Spanish understand “newscaster Spaniard”, thanks to TVE Internacional - that doesn’t mean they can or want to speak it; heck, about one quarter of Spain’s population can’t speak “newscaster Spaniard”. I can drive someone from the other end of Spain up a wall by choosing local words instead of wider-usage ones, never mind what an Argentinian and me could do to each other playing that game.