Okay, in the debates over DADT that have taken place in (and out of) Congress during the last several years, there’ve been a ton of arguments, both pro and con, both practical and theoretical, both sensible and loony, etc, etc.
One pro-repeal argument I’ve heard frequently says that DADT has forced the US to operate with a dramatically smaller staff of translators and intelligence operatives than it would like. The argument usually focuses on the lack of sufficient speakers of Arabic. Because of DADT, so the argument goes, the US has been severely limited in its ability to find out what’s going on in Arabic-speaking countries.
My questions:
Is it true that DADT has had an especially significant effect on translators in general–more so than on ordinary soldiers, medical personnel, legal types, logistics experts, etc.? If so, is that because this field attracts a disproportionately high share of gay men and lesbians, or because gays and lesbians in this field are less willing to keep their sexual orientation a secret, or because bosses in these departments are more likely than their counterparts in other parts of the military to try to ferret out people who aren’t straight and less likely to turn a deliberate blind eye to evidence of homosexuality?
As for the specific claim about Arabic–during the last 15 years or so, has the military’s “Arabic department” actually been consistently understaffed? Has it been more shorthanded than other language “departments,” such as Russian, say, or Chinese? Has there been a particularly large exodus of Arabic translators from the military due to DADT? If so, again–why specifically Arabic? Or is it just that lacking sufficient speakers of Norwegian or Thai within the military bothers very few Americans, while lacking enough Arabic speakers sends us into a tizzy–thus, going for the language most likely to elicit an OMG-we’re-in-deep-shit kind of response?
I’ve seen these claims a lot over the years; in this thread (What did McCains remarks mean re DADT-elites-sacrifice... - Great Debates - Straight Dope Message Board) you can find both Sampiro and Reality Chuck mentioning it. For all I know it’s perfectly true–I certainly don’t have any evidence that suggests otherwise–but I guess I don’t understand why Arabic translators would be more likely to be affected than anyone else. Any insight, or actual cites, would be much appreciated!
They weren’t. About 11,000 people were kicked out due to DADT, and about 58 of them were Arabic translators. So the vast majority, obviously, were not Arabic translators.
A big deal is made of it, though, because the Army has had trouble getting Arabic translators. In 2001, for instance, the Army only filled about half of their translator slots. In that, in 2001, we were attacked by Arabic speaking terrorists, and 2003, we invaded an Arabic speaking country, we suffered from the lack of translators, and so it didn’t make sense to some people, since we needed Arabic speakers more than ever, to kick them out because they were gay.
Back of the envelope calculations from these figures say that just over 0.5% of those discharged under DADT have been Arabic translators.
That still looks like over-representation to me. I struggle to believe that fully half a percent of the US’s fighting men and women are translators from Arabic. Am I missing something?
Arabic translators are tough to come by in government service. A lot of this is due to the requirement for security clearances (kind of like, hey - would you grant a Nazi a security clearance during WWII? Admittedly, there’s some bias involved there). Also, translators working the field with infantry and intel units in the military could also seek employment with civilian or semi-civilian agencies (FBI, ATFE, DEA, NSA, CIA, whatever) without having to go sleep in pods/tents in some godforsaken place that they may very well have left for a very good reason.
I can’t speak for the military, but I recall reading that at the time of 9/11, the State Department had only about five people who spoke Arabic well enough to go on, say, Al-Jazeera and have an articulate, well-thought out discussion with a native speaker.
And keep in mind that State Department jobs are among the most coveted in the government, and if they managed to have only a handful of people with that skill, you can imagine the trouble the military would have in attracting and retaining translators.
I have wondered about this too. The way some people talk and write about it, you’d think being gay is a requirement to be an Arabic translator.
My guess is that gay Arabs are more likely to want to “get back at” their conservative upbringing by going to war against Arab fundamentalists. Because of that culture’s very repressive attitude towards homosexuality (certain kinds of it…I’ve read that they’re fine with “pitching” but not “catching”, i.e. you’re not really homosexual if you’re the one doing the penetrating and your partner is effeminate or a young boy).
According to Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America by Nathaniel Frank (2009), the training school for linguists was much more liberal about gays than the actual service branches, which led to them being outed much more frequently since they didn’t expect that DADT was actually enforced:
There seems to be a belief that US military Arabic translators are actually native-speaking Arabs. Not the case–the vast majority of them are regular Americans who had the brains to be admitted into the linguist program. The one Kuwaiti guy I knew in the program was switched over to learn Russian.
Arabic is the toughest language taught at DLI and as such it’s hard to find candidates who have the right brains AND who can get a top secret clearance. The language training alone takes 63 weeks and after that there is additional training. I burned 2 years of my 4 year enlistment before I ever received an actual job assignment. Linguists are hard to replace. There were a lot of soldiers with 4+years of college who enlisted just so they could ditch their student loans and get a job. That level of education carries with it a general sense of tolerance–people that bright typically concern themselves with other things than faggits and lezbeans. I recall a few occasions where someone would get all redneck about queers and end up becoming an outcast. People genuinely didn’t care about it. Once I was actually stationed somewhere I knew WAY more people who were in trouble for being fat than for being gay.
As a side note, in a company of 50 people I knew of at least 5 people that were openly gay. I have to assume there were a few more who remained closeted. So I’d guess 10-20% of us were on the wrong side of the law. That gay/straight ratio seems a little higher than the general population.
This. The intelligence community hires multilingual translators and then trains them in a new language. They rarely, if ever, hire people to translate languages they already know.
Just want to thank the OP. (well, and the responses too of course) I had been wondering about this, but hadn’t come up with a more diplomatic phrasing than “What is it with gays and 'terps?”
I don’t think anybody has intended to imply that a disproportionate number of interpreters are gay or that interpreters have been grossly disproportionately affected by DADT. The reason they’re mentioned so often is because, as mentioned above, it is a crucial role that is somewhere between extremely difficult & impossible to replace immediately when one is lost, and yet the zealous DADT inquisitors have gotten rid of people with this incredibly rare skill for no other reason than being homosexual (i.e. not for sexually harassing other members of their gender or for having gay sex on armed forces TV or anything, just for being gay) even though most people couldn’t care less about their orientation and to get rid of them endangers operations and lives.
Any DADT discharge is disgusting (I’m not talking about people discharged for sexual misconduct that would get a straight soldier discharged but those who just happen to be gay), but the firing of interpreters is akin to firing gay doctors and nurses from an already overworked E.R. and hospital when they can’t keep a staff as it is. Finding somebody to speak Spanish, a language taught in most public schools and by millions of U.S. citizens as a first language, is hard in most places outside of states with large barrios; finding a U.S. citizen who is fluent in English and in Arabic- a language with no practical application in most civilian settings and that is not taught in U.S. primary schools and a language that doesn’t have a familiar Germanic base/Latin influence to build on like studying most European languages- it’s next to impossible; I’ve worked in universities and the number of people I’ve known in my life who were fluent in both Arabic and English could easily fit into my living room; none of the people I’ve known who’ve served in Iraq and Afghanistan could speak more than a few words. This is why interpreters get brought up more as an illustration of just how ridiculous DADT advocates were in their willingness to ‘cut off their nose to spite their face’.
Based on information I got from a senior EU translator, it’s easier and therefore cheaper to teach another language to someone who can translate already than to teach translation to someone who happens to know two languages, but who misunderstands the nature of language and of translation (the example he gave was “thinks you can always translate word for word”).
He’s British, originally got hired to translate from French and German into English but nowadays does most of his work translating into Lithuanian - which he learned in the course of setting up the Lithuanian translation office. One of the Lithuanians checks his work (the EU is one of the places where this kind of basic QA is consistently followed).
