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.
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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