Thread: Linguist training

Originally Posted by Teech

What as in "JAFI"? - This upsets me greatly.
...

This term fcuks me off like you would not believe. Hangover from the Balkans I believe but still used in some circles. Not too long ago, I was teaching a dialect refresher course and we were asked to provide language support to an exercise, to which I willingly agreed. However, when I heard myself and my students being openly refered to as JAFI's, as in "We need another JAFI over here", I promptly gathered my course together and we just left. My feeling was that if we, as linguists were just an afterthought, then we were evidently surplus to requirements. Probably not the most adult course of action I've ever taken, but I couldn't give a shit. See what you've done now Teech?????
I was in such a good mood this morning!

This is a really interesting debate and one close to my heart. I'll fess up, I am a linguist, but not a military one (civvie Uni, not DSL). I am aware of many of the issues being discussed and grapple with them daily.

My concern is not particularly the DJC side of languages, although many of the problems with language training affect both sides of the house. I have no axe to grind with DSL, but neither do I think they produce perfectly formed linguists, immediately fit for task.

I see a couple of issues:

DSL is a one-size-fits-all affair. Students on a course will end up operating to very different Job Specs and will have different demands on their language skills. To organise a capability in any other way may be more effective, but would come a greater cost. Cost is an issue at the moment. You can be as idealistic as you want about providing the best training/eqpt etc that money can buy for our Boys and Girls, but you and I both know that we are provided for by the lowest bidder.

Any training provider will train to a set standard and there will usually be a requriement for an element of on-the-job training. Only DefDip seems to be able to afford the one-to-one training model. DJC and the Dark Side could never manage this on our industrial scale (relatively speaking) sausage machine. What concerns me is when this OJT element is left to chance. OJT should be understood, planned and quality controled as much as any other part of your training. At the moment it is not. Therein lies part of the problem. It is being hidden and therefore ignored.

With respect to training being fit for the operational requirement; what is the operational requirement? The process for identifing what languages are required, to what level and in what quantities simply does not work. It requires people to make assessments then commit to that decision years ahead of the linguists turning up in theatre. It requires planning; years ahead of little Billy turning up at the doors of DSL and it isn't easy. So tell, me, what languages should DSL start teaching in 2012 for operations being conducted in 2014? Answers on a postcard 'coz it takes that long.

And on that subject, what standard should be used? SLPs are fairly useless in preparing an individual to conduct a particular linguistic task because they are (by necessity) so vague. The system is looking into alternatives, but these things take time. Not least because people often resist change.

University of Westminster - don't get me started! I was involved with the exam boards last year and I tried hard to change things for the better and have the exam better reflect the operational task. But I was only one (albeit incessant) voice in the room. I note, with interest, that I was not invited back this year. Says a lot, doesn't it?

There is work ongoing to inprove the way in which language courses are planned, designed and assessed. There is an attempt to make the course and assessment more closely aligned to the operational task. But don't hold your breath. There are many stakes in this, not all of them have the linguists' best interests at heart. I also takes time to get it right, during which the operating environment will have changed.

There are many more parts to this: recruitment, pay, career paths, qualifications, and so on and my suspicion is that good people were having these discussions 30 years ago, and probably 20 years ago, and certainly 10 years ago. I know this all means Jam tomorrow, but my main point is that it is not "being ignored by the Brass" The Brass are quite wound up over the whole issue (which is not to say it'll all be sunshine and rainbows in the near future - but it is not being ignored).

Stuadh

PS devexwarrior - being an interpreter does not require being a native speaker. My neighbour used to be a 'terp for the UN in 5 languages and she came from a monoglot family and went to the same school that I did, which was a standard comprehensive offering only three languages.

Many thanks for all the advice, it is gratefully received.

I will certainly look into this more in the future.

Best Regards

Mali.

edited for bad spelling

I am not a regular on the Army Rumour Service, however, I am a linguist and have recently returned from operations having been subjected to language training at DSL, and am contributing my views in the hope that someone far higher up the pay-scale will see these widely held views about DSL and language training and do something to move the current unsatisfactory situation at DSL, for both staff and students, forward.

My observations are:

1. If the army/navy/RAF want to invest in linguists, do it properly or don't do it at all. Make it a real career route instead of something that is dipped into sporadically, and all previous language competency achieved is subsequently lost to have to be painstakingly regained at some later date in preparation for the next op tour. The current system wastes everyone's time and investment. Language must be built upon over years to create true competence. Use it or lose it.

2. Staff must be given some teacher training. Sure they speak the wonderful languages we want to learn, but many haven't a clue about course structure or writing a syllabus. Teaching must be sensible and progressive, not a scattergun approach. AND such teachers need to understand their own grammar before they can teach it - nobody is really checking this right now. This is very stressful for staff and students - resulting in staff who want to leave, and creating disruption on the course as the students vent their anger on staff, then get new staff, setting the learning process back again. Not a great environment for learning.

3. Westminster exams are quite ridiculous, e.g. due to the generic nature of some of the papers, I have seen situational interpreting papers for Afghanistan which are based on the navy - hello! Since when did Afghanistan have a navy? Exam papers must be realistic and sensible and checked by military personnel for sanity.

4. Military staff at DSL should all be linguists and understand their teachers. It's a case of know your men, and women. The Arabic Wing does this very well.

5. Moral courage: Those failing the course should be binned early or deselect themselves, instead of cadging thousands of pounds worth of free cash off H.M. only to be sent to theatre to hang around kicking their heels for 6 months because they can't say anything. There are some amazingly talented linguists on those courses at DSL, but there are also some complete time-wasters who need to be told their fortunes early. Then we can use the saved cash to buy dictionaries which DSL cannot currently afford, instead of forking out ourselves.

6. People need to pass exams and be competent. Would you send a rifleman to theatre who had not even passed his APWT, and was thereore dangerous? Thought not.

7. And finally, what is the end-state? If you want a patrols-interpreter rank-ranged at Private to Corporal, run a course just for them to become patrols-interpreters specifically, then deploy them. If you want a CIMIC officer rank-ranged Lt- Major, train them specifically on a longer course, then deploy as appropriate, same detail for Local Council/Shura attendees. If you want an FHT interpreter, or a Defence Attache course, or an LO course, then do the same, write a specific course. The current situation seems to be, train everyone at the lowest common denominator, then fingers-crossed when we send them to theatre they'll have the nowse to find something to do being "useful" for 6 months, and somehow they'll magically learn the words they need to know "on-the-job". This is incredibly frustrating and disrespectful to the time and efforts of the students and does little for retention. There seems to be no end-state defined at the current time. When I asked one of my teachers what Westminster had given as an end-state, it was "be fluent in X language". Sorry, this is unrealistic and too broad and unmeasurable.

I don't profess to have all the answers, but I do believe that the current system could be truly overhauled by military linguists and educators who truly care about the product they are turning out of DSL, and they probably need to stay in the languages world for more than a two-year posting, because it is so specialised. The current system is far from ideal, but it is not impossible to improve it.

Originally Posted by stuadh

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PS devexwarrior - being an interpreter does not require being a native speaker. My neighbour used to be a 'terp for the UN in 5 languages and she came from a monoglot family and went to the same school that I did, which was a standard comprehensive offering only three languages.

Fair one-the example I based my post on an acquaintance who has lived in Germany for 25 years and is frequently mistaken for a native-he applied for a job with the EU and was told to ram it as his german wasn't up to their perfect standards-I suppose EU work at the highest levels for conference interpreting-they also wanted to know where his professional interpreting qulaification was.

Field interpreting can be done with non native skills-I have done it myself based on SLP 4's but was very thankful for an awareness of the ethics and techniques which my teacher had given us because he thought it was an important part of linguist training (though not on the sylabus). I did a reasonable job though I would never consder myself "an interpreter" just a decent linguist.


I agree with all your other points as well-I was on a long course at UoW when they first took the MoDLEB contract back in 95. Little had changed when I went back to DSL 10 years later and I suspect it'll still be the same next time I go back there (fairly soon if my desk officer is to be believed)

Hi!
Would someone help me translate the following:

yo no se si me queres
o si me olvidas
lo que yo se que es vivo
cuando me miras...

(not sure if grammar is correct)

Thanks.

Originally Posted by Charlie_Cong

This involves using the talents we have better, namely:

The Students -
The most productive fortnight my course had was when we unofficially ran our own timetable based on tutorials and minimal class time. The ethos was directed study - go away in your own time and learn about X so you can share your findings in the study language or undergo a detailed IOP about it. Go away and listen to these news reports. Come back with questions and requests for clarification.

The same is true of the Arabic course - their most productive week was a study week entirely of personal study while their tutors re-wrote the programme.

These students are wasted in a "send-recieve" culture of 7 hours class room time a day. Instead of being allowed to learn like the intelligent volunteers they are, they're taught like a herd of recruits.

The Native Speakers
The teachers here have enourmous potential. The teachers here have degrees, doctorates, previous high ranks in the Afghan Army... but they're hamstrung by a template written by someone in Chicksands, ages ago, who nobody has actually met or held to account.

They just need to be taught a common simple, workable teaching method and how to use the assets we have.
Charlie

This thread is very interesting for me as I joined the Corps with the intention of being a linguist but perhaps fortunately left the long course after 4 months-ish. The 'send-receive' culture was most definitely evident, as was the admitted desire of our instructor to whittle down the 12 students to 6 or less so she could manage it. Although a gifted linguist she was no teacher and the few weeks we had a former Int Corps soldier and a serving SNCO from a different service were inspirations to those struggling. Unfortunately she came back, but it wasnt her that made me leave the course.

2 years later Im off the course in a J2 role, starting on my second tour and although busy build up a friendship with a locally employed native interpreter, who happened to be a) a former soldier and b) a former teacher of Arabic to illiterate Iraqis and of English to high school pupils. I learnt more in 3 weeks than I had done in 3 months previously, although Im sure some of it was also revision. He taught an ingenious way(to me) to get over the difficulty of the Arabic alphabet was to create a sentence with all characters and once you could read it and understand it - this took about a week studying 2 hrs a day (Im not saying we were brilliant) in comparison to over a month on the structured course in which many of our original 12 still could not read a sentence. Once reading words we could learn faster and I kept it up for a couple of months before my dayjob became a bit more intense.

Unfortunately I have no desire to continue with Arabic and hope to study a different language for my own enjoyment and in my own time, simply because I like the people who speak the language I intend to learn. Of course others will have that same inquisitiveness and empathy for Arabs, Pashtuns, and perhaps even Persians - I certainly hope so.

:D

:D

Originally Posted by Domovoy

Hi!
Would someone help me translate the following:

yo no se si me queres
o si me olvidas
lo que yo se que es vivo
cuando me miras...

(not sure if grammar is correct)

Thanks.

Translation

I do not know if I want or if I forget what it was that I was alive when I view ...

I do not claim to have any mastery of the Spanish language, by the way. I just ran that through a translation widget in Mac OS, so you might need to shuffle the words around in order to come up with a decent English translation. Also, if you have any basic translation requests, you can try Babelfish for free, online translations.

yo no se si me queres
o si me olvidas
lo que yo se que es vivo
cuando me miras...


A slightly more accurate translation would be "I don't know if you love me, or if you forget (have forgotten) me - what I do know is that I feel alive when you look at me"

As others have come close to saying in this thread, the machine simply can't do this task accurately - yet!

:D

Thank you!!!

Originally Posted by Dontdreamit

GAYNESS ON

After both of my posts above Gremlin has just sent me a fairly personal (and it should be said) commendable PM basically saying he is climbing back into his box and quietly closing the lid.

Top Marks to a man who admits when he is slightly out of his depth but had his heart in the right place.

GAYNESS OFF

Get back to uni you soap dodging scummer.

I knew someome was going to fall for that one

I love this post. It couldn't be more wrong unless... well, it just couldn't.

[quote="Dontdreamit"]

....how come they actually do? Shocked Confused

Given that I was working with them, I am in a pretty place to comment that our linguists do a first class job, banter aside, and your comments are mostly ridiculous.

While it's heartening to hear your opinion, you aren't really qualified to judge. How much detail did your linguist get and pass on (in either direction)? How quickly? With what connotations? You just can't know. Many important details could have been missed. As one example, there was an incident at the COB many moons ago where there was an alert as a linguist heard the words for "VBIED". Full alert, native linguist called. Turned out that the chap had just asked if anyone had been hurt by the car bomb earlier in the week. Good old vocab bingo.

What's your alternative...

Hire civvies? Yeh Arabic linguists from civvy street are lining up up to throw themselves into the back of a Warrior and drive through contacts.

Obviously, this is now a redundant question, but the underlying concept remains. But yes, is the short answer. You may be aware that the vast proportion of US interpreters are native speaker civilians. TCNs, locally employed and US nationals.

Hire locals? Fair one. We do. Big trust/security issue though.

Why not? We do for cooking, cleaning, drainage, sewage etc.
The vast majority of interpreting is not sensitive. The small amount that is obviously needs another solution - but the numbers are small (NB. the solution is likely to be multiple small solutions).

For other taskings outside interpreting... Career courses ought to manage to reach the standard because these people actually are...wait for it... working as linguists for a career and developing expertise over time. The best way, rather than at artificially high learn/forget speeds.

Expand the training? How long would be long enough in your opinion? 6 years minimum for Spanish you say? So should have just told Saddam to 'hold on a minute mucker - give us the best part of a decade to train our linguist force'?

Realistically, 18 months is not unreasonable to get to a decent standard to progress to on-the-job training. But the balance of the 18 months is wrong. It isn't used effectively. But this 18 month point is to start working in the language - yet people are currently expected to be at a professional level instantly.

As for Saddam... You might argue that a professional army would say, "If we don't have the tools, we can't do the job." And not having enough good linguists is definitely a critical tool. So, probably, yes.
But, more importantly, why didn't we have enough linguists? There are loads of people employed across PJHQ and the MOD whose jobs are to assess and rate future threats and plan accordingly. When the Russian threat was downgraded in the 90s, we reduced spending on conventional weapons, nuclear deterrent and Russian linguists. It's called planning. It used to be popular in the military.

Furthermore, Arabic is spoken by 120 million people - one of the most important languages in the world and the basis for the third most popular religion (by size). That's reason enough for us to maintain a professional competence (has the threat from Syria, Iraq, Yemen ever really gone away? Hizb-al-lah? What about traditional commitments in the Gulf? and now North Africa, Sudan... and the fact that the Gulf is a major strategic shipping lane and home to enormous oil reserves... To me, ample reasons for us to have funded Arabic throughout the nineties up to today.

No. The course (I would faithfully believe) is the necessary qualification required to accomplish the mission the troops have been given.

touching. naive. and exactly why nothing gets improved. Crass attitude that flies in the face of all experience.

Any parallel between Arabic and Pashto is null and void since different theatres, different approaches, different languages.

I thought the last sentence was the low point, and then you came out with this.
Fundamentally, this is so untrue as to require a whole essay to explain it.
I'll content myself with:
-same Army
-CoIn has fundamental principles
-Language training/teaching/learning/studying/practising is standard. The language and culture are different (although full marks for being one of the few who knows that Arabic isn't an Afghan language).

Pray tell, Gremlin, where you would conjure these plentiful native Pashto speakers (and fluent English) to come over and teach our troops? I believe we have found the only 3!

I've added some commas to convey some meaning in your post. The obvious places are:
1. California - the largest community of Afghans outside Afghanistan in the world
2. Afghanistan - see (1)
3. UK - a country heavily involved in Afghanistan for a century and a half. The teaching materials for young officers in the Indian Army at the end of the nineteenth century are actually better than the current ones
4. India - see (3)
5. Pakistan - see (3) and (4)

is that enough ideas?

Get a grip of yourself - we have limited resources and do what we can to train our troops accordingly.

Yes - which is exactly why we should maximise benefit and value, minimise wastefulness and inefficiencies. Hence the debate in the first place.

And from the training they recieve our lads do a fine job and then some.

In most cases, true. But the caveat shouldn't be needed. And it is.

But thanks for your (extremely limited) viewpoint. I am sure CGS will take it on board. Rolling Eyes

I'm equally certain that nothing significant will change. But it should. The viewpoint is deliberately concentrated - that's the nature of this thread.

5. Moral courage: Those failing the course should be binned early or deselect themselves, instead of cadging thousands of pounds worth of free cash off H.M. only to be sent to theatre to hang around kicking their heels for 6 months because they can't say anything. There are some amazingly talented linguists on those courses at DSL, but there are also some complete time-wasters who need to be told their fortunes early. Then we can use the saved cash to buy dictionaries which DSL cannot currently afford, instead of forking out ourselves.

Train in - not select out. Your a linguist not SAS. Funding is a separate issue not really affected by kicking less able students off the course.

Again, so wrong as to be laughable. There is a finite training resource that is being spread to thinly trying to maintain quantity not quality. This results in courses going more slowly, the competent being demotivated and tutors being frustrated.
The half-way house of extras and back-coursing works everywhere else, so why not at DSL?

6. People need to pass exams and be competent. Would you send a rifleman to theatre who had not even passed his APWT, and was therefore dangerous? Thought not.

Lots of guys get sent to theatre without the necassary docs, matts and whp's. It's not ideal but it happens. But in reality - isn't in theatre where a linguist really learns his trade?? Cannot keep them in a classroom forever mucker. They have to get on the ground and actually use the language to become proficient. It could be argued troops lives are at risk. But I know if it was a choice between NO linguist or a BAD linguist when the sh1t kicks off.....

It happens, but it shouldn't. I'd be amazed if you were this blase if someone in your platoon was injured by an ND from a 'terp, whose error was caused by a lack of training rather than stupidity. So would you be more accommodating if that 'terp failed to pass on an IED warning, resulting in your patrol losing blokes?

The point is, not "if it was a choice between NO linguist or a BAD linguist when the sh1t kicks off" but a choice between a linguist or a better linguist.

7. And finally, what is the end-state? If you want a patrols-interpreter rank-ranged at Private to Corporal, run a course just for them to become patrols-interpreters specifically, then deploy them. If you want a CIMIC officer rank-ranged Lt- Major, train them specifically on a longer course, then deploy as appropriate, same detail for Local Council/Shura attendees. If you want an FHT interpreter, or a Defence Attache course, or an LO course, then do the same, write a specific course. The current situation seems to be, train everyone at the lowest common denominator, then fingers-crossed when we send them to theatre they'll have the nowse to find something to do being "useful" for 6 months.

And what about guys whose role crosses the boundaries? Recce formations who become impromptu Shura attendees? Linguists sat in dark rooms back in the UK with only faint tinny Arabic mixed with white noise?

The end state is a capable force who can adapt to various roles.

i don't wholly agree with the original post, as I personally believe that there are core truths that are common and a broad base gives the very flexibility you refer to. But I do agree that people should (a) be selected in advance for a skill set (e.g. training, sigint, humint) and (b) be given role-specific upgrade training.

I totally agree that the aim is as your summary. What I don't agree is that (a) we are getting that or that (b) the system is effectively configured to achieve that.

"I am pretty sure we do not send people to theatre without them knowing what they are doing." ]

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

"Seriously, no one has ever rocked up in Basrah/Helmand and been told 'go find something useful to do' whilst the rest of us patrol/build/fix/adminster/assess accordingly" ]

I can't tell your tone, and I'm wary of biting even more, but I'll assume your tone is as dry and your content as ridiculous as the rest of your post.
For response, see previous.