[EDLING:59] US: Lost in Translation

[Francis M Hult]

Via lgpolicy...

> http://chronicle.com/weekly/v53/i34/34a02801.htm
> >From the issue dated April 27, 2007
> 
> Lost in Translation
> By JOSH KELLER
> 
> Washington
> 
> Everette E. Jordan cannot find enough translators. Mr. Jordan, who runs a
> federal center that helps translate a backlog of documents for the CIA,
> FBI, and other government agencies, says that because the United States
> does such a poor job training translators and interpreters, recruiting
> enough help is impossible. So the director of the National Virtual
> Translation Center has turned to students for help. The center, itself
> only four years old, started a program about a year ago to send
> unclassified government documents to translation professors at several
> universities to give to their students as course work. The documents
> include newspaper articles, online hacker journals, and threat letters.
> The professors then return the translated documents to the center, and the
> students receive course credit.
> 
> The idea, says Mr. Jordan, is to both help with the government's
> translation backlog and start partnerships with university programs to
> increase the nation's long-term supply of translators and interpreters. To
> that end, he has aggressively courted universities, offering them
> internships for their students and help developing basic curricula. He
> ultimately hopes to offer federal grants and contracts to expand
> university translation departments. But the center's translation programs
> are missing an essential element:  money. Mr. Jordan says that he has not
> yet been able to secure any substantial support in the federal budget for
> expanded partnerships with universities, and that his program "has yet to
> get off the ground."
> 
> "There isn't any money put into it yet," he says. "It's not for [lack of]
> trying." Officials at university translation programs say they would be
> happy to work with the center to expand their offerings. But they say the
> center's limited attempts at partnerships reflect a familiar problem:
> Despite the attention focused on the nation's failings in translation
> after September 11, 2001, few federal grants and contracts for translation
> and interpretation studies have followed.
> 
> 'Good Intentions'
> 
> "The good intentions are there it's just that the money isn't," says
> Elizabeth Lowe, director of the translation program at the University of
> Florida. "To expand curriculum to do the innovative kinds of enhancements
> that would really make a difference, we need external funding." The lack
> of federal financing is often matched by universities themselves.
> Programs in translation and interpretation studies, which stress the
> skills and mind-set needed by translators in addition to fluency in the
> languages themselves, have no established constituency at most colleges.
> They often compete for resources with traditional literature departments
> and with other disciplines for a place within the liberal arts.
> 
> Francoise Massardier-Kenney is the director of the Institute for Applied
> Linguistics at Kent State University, one of only two comprehensive
> programs in the country to offer a master's degree in translation studies.
> She says the university declined to help translate documents for the
> virtual-translation center, citing an already full curriculum. Efforts
> like the document exchange program, she says, are like "little bandages on
> individual problems." The number of students who graduate each year from
> an American university with master's degrees in translation or
> interpretation is probably about 100, says Gregory M. Shreve, director of
> Kent State's department of modern- and classical-language studies.
> 
> Increasing the number of translators will require confronting the problem
> systematically, says Mr. Shreve. The greatest need of many university
> translation programs, he says, is more faculty members. Building up the
> infrastructure to recruit and train professors to offer new languages
> would require a sustained investment, he says, and a coherent national
> language policy that took translation seriously. "Where do I get someone
> who can teach Farsi professionally and run a program?" says Mr. Shreve. "I
> need really skilled faculty, and that's hard to find." Mr. Jordan agrees
> that the government has not put nearly enough money into translation
> studies. He says lawmakers often want to produce more translators
> immediately in critical languages like Arabic, Farsi, and Chinese. But
> training a good translator, he says, takes six to eight years.
> 
> He ticks off a list of needs that will be more difficult without enough
> translators: recovering from major disasters, providing good health care,
> preventing terrorist attacks, and nation building. "We're really not going
> to be ready if we don't put in enough money," he says. Marie-Line Sephocle
> is director of the simultaneous interpretation program at Howard
> University, one of only a few such programs in the country. She says Mr.
> Jordan "is one of the rare supporters in the entire government for our
> programs." In the 12 years since the program was started, she says, it has
> received no outside money. In fact, she says, the university initially
> would not finance it either, so some of the professors paid for the
> start-up costs out of their own pockets.
> 
> Since then, the demand from students has grown to more than what the
> program can support. Ms. Sephocle says she constantly receives visitors
> interested in how the program works: other professors, ambassadors, and
> legislators. "They all marvel at it," she says. "They say it's exactly
> what we want.  And then they don't follow up."
> 
> http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 53, Issue 34, Page A28