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Posted on Wed, Oct. 05, 2005



University center aims to speed up process of learning Arabic

BY STEVE IVEY
Chicago Tribune

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - Four years into the war on terror, the intelligence community admits it is still woefully short of fluent speakers of critical languages, particularly Arabic.

Until the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the government didn't consider Arabic language skills a national security concern. Now officials are encountering myriad obstacles in trying to rapidly close the gap.

Arabic differs greatly from English and other Western languages. Attaining proficiency levels required by the government can take nearly four times longer than learning Spanish or French. Many who already knew Arabic were hired by the government and private-sector firms in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, but the government is seeking to hire several thousand more such linguists.

With that in mind, the government on Thursday is opening a new facility at the University of Maryland's Center for the Advanced Study of Language to find innovative ways of producing more Arabic speakers quickly. CIA Director Porter Goss is giving the introductory speech, lending a sort of imprimatur to the government's quest.

"The government is investing significant resources in training in Arabic," said Richard Brecht, the center's executive director. "But we need major breakthroughs to cut the time it takes to learn Arabic. We need major cognitive research."

That research will include examining why some students learn faster, how different people learn and how short- and long-term memory functions contribute to learning a new language. There won't be any Arabic instruction itself.

Arabic reads from right to left. One letter may take on three or four shapes, depending on where it appears in a word. And it has more than 20 dialects that can vary widely.

State Department programs to teach languages such as Spanish and French take 24 weeks, but the Arabic program takes 88 weeks and requires a commitment in the second year to studying in an Arabic-speaking country.

Kevin Hendzel, a spokesman for the American Translators Association and a former White House translator, said the CIA, FBI, State Department, military intelligence and private firms with interests in the Middle East quickly hired the few American Arabic speakers who existed before the terrorist attacks.

"The demand sucked all the oxygen out of the room," Hendzel said. He said now the U.S. faces a similar situation as it did during the Cold War.

"It took a generation to train all the Russian teachers and then train all of us who became linguists," he said. "It took us about 20 years to get caught up on Russian, and it may take that long again."

But Ron Marks, a former CIA official who is now a senior fellow at George Washington University's homeland security program, said the government should be able to learn from the Cold War response to language needs.

"We need to rethink how we do this," he said. "This isn't the first time around."

The language center at Maryland is funded by the Defense Department but is independent of the department. Marks said the intelligence community needs more private sector research to find solutions.

"There's a little bit of a feeling that, if it ain't invented (in the intelligence community), we don't want anything to do with it," he said. "Hundreds of multinational corporations in the private sector deal with this stuff all the time. You've got to take advantage of that. You can't keep reinventing the wheel."

Mitchell Reiss, a former State Department official and now vice provost for international affairs at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., said Arabic-speaking U.S. citizens who haven't yet opted to work for an intelligence agency may be reluctant to do so if they oppose the government's policies in the Mideast.

Despite the difficulties of learning Arabic, U.S. colleges and universities are producing more such speakers than ever. According to the Modern Language Association's latest survey, 10,584 students studied Arabic in 2002, nearly double the number who studied it in 1998.

More of those graduates are taking government jobs. The FBI had 216 Arabic-speaking employees and contract linguists in April 2004, up from 70 on Sept. 11, 2001. At the State Department's Foreign Service Institute, 441 students are studying Arabic this year, nearly four times the number in 2001. Specific numbers are not available from the CIA, but officials there say the numbers have increased.

"Those numbers are so paltry, it can keep doubling and we'll still be well short of what we need," Brecht said. "There are more than 85 government agencies and offices with language requirements."

A report by the Justice Department's inspector general this year said merely increasing the number of FBI translators was not enough.

The report found that, as of March 31, more than 700,000 hours of counterterrorism and counterintelligence audio intercepts - one-third of what it collected since Sept. 11 - had yet to be reviewed. The report also found that while FBI Director Robert Mueller originally said all al-Qaida audio should be reviewed within 12 hours, that rule no longer stands because the FBI "came to realize that this goal was unreasonable."

But the intelligence community's language needs don't end with translators. Brecht said the lack of proficient Arabic speakers has limited the nation's ability to spread its message and participate in active debate in the Arab world.

The State Department "is desperate to have diplomats to perform at the very highest levels on Arabic media," Brecht said. "How can you do `Crossfire' on Al-Arabiya without those language skills?"