Last updated at 15:28 pm on 06th August 2008
Interview of Lin Wusun, translation guru
Translating is an interesting job. Good translators not only have to translate a range of works, they must also use the methods and experiences of others for reference. As a tool of cultural communication, translating promotes exchange and innovation. On July 24, Lin Wusun, a famous senior translator, visited China.org.cn and talked with us about translation and its cultural impact.
China.org.cn: We know that you are rich in experience. What were the reasons that made you decide to use English as a tool of international communication and to embark on your translation career?
Lin Wusun: The founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 offered a chance for us, people studying in America, to serve our country. I returned home in July 1950 and made friends with a well-known poet who worked at People’s China magazine. Previously, he and I hadn’t known each other. However, when he heard of my experiences, he took my hand and said excitedly, “Our magazine urgently needs young people who can write in English. Please join us.”
China.org.cn: There is no doubt that translating is hard work. Some wonder if you have ever been tired of it and wanted to change a job.
Lin Wusun: No. To be frank, translating is exhausting, but very rewarding, for example an in-depth understanding about the original work. Such an experience can be amazing and I feel a strong sense of achievement after recreating a work in a second language. As well as translating I write occasional articles. I think these two activities are complimentary.
China.org.cn: Translating is jokingly described as “a project for the grey-haired”. There are many elderly translators at the international seminars. Does this indicate that our young translators cannot tackle high-level translation works?
Lin Wusun: In my opinion, no translators are ever ‘past it’, because their experience over the long term gives them a scientific translation method. But the case of interpreters, especially simultaneous interpreters, is totally different. Interpretation is a kind of high intensity mental work. An elderly interpreter might struggle with the pace and will eventually need to be replaced. In contrast, I would say that the experienced translator can handle urgent needs.
China.org.cn: Many old translators follow a good habit: never too old to learn. What’s your opinion on this?
Lin Wusun: The demand for translators is very high. A good translator must not only continue to develop his languages skills, but also broaden his knowledge.
At the moment I am translating a book about Shanghai Pudong’s reform and development written by Zhao Qizheng. One chapter is about finance and this is a subject that I am not familiar with. Therefore, I have done two things. First, I have consulted a range of financial books which have given me some basic knowledge of finance. Second, I have asked an expert to review the financial expressions in my translation.
A translator can constantly explore new fields, and there is no uniform standard in the process of translating. It is a creative process. I think this is the charm of translating.
China.org.cn: In the context of globalization and the opening of China’s cultural borders, there is an increasing demand for translators. What do you think about the level of translators in our country?
Lin Wusun: Generally speaking, about 500,000 people work as translators in China. Some are part-time. However, there is a lot of translation work to be done. The number of translators is obvious far from sufficient. How to solve this problem? First, alongside the professional translation colleges, many universities and other institutions have set up translation departments. Second, qualifying examinations are being held to encourage people to become translators. Third, there is a growing emphasis on bilingual teaching in the primary years – the best time to learn additional languages.
Management of the industry is a very important field that needs to be treated as a priority. In the developed countries a lot of effort is devoted to training and management of translators. This is especially the case in Europe because the continent has so many languages.
We should have an objective standard, and translation works must come up to this standard. We can evaluate and analyze translation works in a specialized publication, pointing out what is good and what is bad.
In addition to this standard, there is another very important standard in the management of the industry – that of price. In western countries the translation industry is regulated: competition on the basis of price is banned. We need a virtuous circle.
China.org.cn: We know that you have a good personal relationship with Israel Epstein, the famous international journalist. Would you like to talk about him?
Lin Wusun: I have had a lot of help from foreign experts and foreign colleagues during my career. I feel an immense gratitude to them.
Epstein is one of them. He was not only a journalist, but also a scholar. He told me that he didn’t attend university. He had to stay at home because of a leg injury, and he used to read Encyclopedia Britannica. Making full use of any time available to study is always worthwhile.
Epstein was dedicated. In the course of 30 years he visited Tibet four times and he wrote a very famous book called Tibet Transformed. He systematically took notes and kept them all, from which I learned a great deal.
He was optimistic and kind. No matter what he was asked by young men, he answered seriously. His wealth of experience and knowledge in the fields of publishing and communication were a great help to me.
China.org.cn: You have stressed on many occasions that a detailed knowledge of Chinese is of vital importance to a Chinese speaking translator. Why do you think so?
Lin Wusun: When lecturing in Nanjing in 2003 I told students that the first thing for a Chinese translator to do is to learn Chinese well. Audiences frequently raised such issues as: “I am afraid that I might forget my Chinese when learning English”, or “What if I forgot my Chinese, and my English is not good enough?” Few foreign language students are skilled in Chinese, which is certain to influence their understanding of the original work when translating from Chinese to a foreign language. The converse would apply to someone translating into Chinese. Foreign language students should therefore give attention to their mother language. Speaking well is not the same as writing well.
I have found over the last 2-3 years that many foreign language study colleges also have classes in Chinese and traditional Chinese. Students are not only required to study traditional Chinese, but also traditional Chinese culture. Students must excel in both Chinese and foreign languages, and at the same time should work on the cultures of both countries.
China.org.cn: The 18th FIT World Congress, described as the Olympics of the translation world, is to open in Shanghai. What do you think of this conference and its theme – “translation and diversified culture”?
Lin Wusun: It was not easy to get the opportunity to hold this conference. China worked hard on its preparation after careful deliberation. We applied to host the conference as we believe we are capable of organizing it well. China won support from all the participants. This is an important conference, as the FIT World Congress has never been held in Asia. Most of the previous conferences were in Europe, apart the one in Australia in 1996. This time it will be in China, which proves that the translation world is changing and that the international status of China is improving as well.
This conference has a good theme, “translation and diversified culture”. Global economic integration is bringing huge changes to the world, and countries and regions are becoming more homogenized. Shanghai’s economy boomed as it took advantage of this globalization. The significance of this conference is to present the world with the huge changes that have taken place in China.
One issue is that globalization brings not only economic expansion but also powerful cultural influences. Popular culture through media like movies and cartoons is flooding into developing countries. Being more influenced by foreign imports than their own culture, young people in China will be familiar with western pop singers, but not Beijing Opera. This applies not only to China but to the whole world. The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) promotes the need for a diverse world, and we should protect intangible cultural heritage.
Many species in nature become extinct, but never again should this happen to a culture. Cultures do not simply belong to a specific country, but are a treasure deposited in the long history of humanity. We need to make it a priority in every nation and region to protect, preserve and develop its own cultural characteristics. We need a world of integrated cultures, but not at the price of the disappearance of some.
Translation makes a great contribution to cultural protection. Other people know of our long history and regional characteristics through the translation of works into different languages. China’s folk music tradition possesses endless variety, the performance of which in Vienna promotes the exchange of Chinese traditional culture with others.
The world we are living in should be one of great diversity. This also helps us understand and build friendship. If we all know each other the occurrence of war would be rare, and conflicts could be solved through discussion and other means. I could not agree more with the President of the International Federation of Translators: “Translation is like water and electricity – we never notice its existence, but we cannot survive without it.”
I hope that more young people here today will join the vital world of translation, with its challenges and its rewards.
Source: http://www.china.org.cn
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 10:08 pm on 17th July 2008
Entrevista a Pere Gimferrer de la RAE
“La lengua catalana también es parte del patrimonio español”
“Sería interesante publicar una lista de los intelectuales que no hemos firmado”, dice el académico Pere Gimferrer, miembro de la Real Academia Española -y autor de veinte libros en catalán, quince en castellano francés- dice que “jamás el manifiesto por la lengua común” que promueven personas afines al partido de Rosa Díez y diversos intelectuales. En su despacho de la editorial Seix Barral, expone sus razones.
¿Cuál fue su primera reacción al ver el manifiesto?
Leí la lista de los primeros firmantes, y vi que no había un solo lingüista entre ellos. En el momento actual, en el que afirman tener ya 100.000 firmantes, hay sólo dos. Y, en este asunto, su opinión es la más valiosa. Evoqué también varios momentos. El más antiguo se produjo en 1981, en las páginas de La Vanguardia, donde Jaime Gil de Biedma publicó un artículo sobre el manifiesto de los 2.300, cuya relectura sigue siendo recomendable. Él dijo ahí que el interés general era “la pacífica convivencia de todos los catalanes” en “un país donde nadie es más que nadie y ninguna de las dos lenguas es más que la otra”.
¿En qué más pensó?
En un libro muy reciente del lingüista madrileño Juan Carlos Moreno Cabrera, El nacionalismo lingüístico, una ideología destructiva (Península), que se refiere a ese nacionalismo lingüístico que identifica la unidad de España con la lengua castellana, idea latente en el manifiesto pero contraria a los hechos, no tienen nada que ver, hemos tenido incluso reyes que hablaban otros idiomas. O en Mater dolorosa de José Álvarez Junco, libro sobre la idea de España aplaudido y premiado pero no sé hasta qué punto comprendido. Y recordé una frase de Américo Castro: “La historia de España es la historia de una inseguridad”. No sé si todos los firmantes conocen estos textos.
¿Qué tradición intelectual española estaría en la línea opuesta a la de los firmantes?
El discurso de Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo en los Juegos Florales de la Exposición Universal de 1888 en Barcelona fue, ante la reina regente, en catalán, una lengua, afirmó, “no forastera ni exótica, sino española y limpia de toda mancha de bastardía”.
¿Esas ideas son un punto de vista extendido?
Cualquier lengua española es parte del patrimonio español. En Santiago de Cuba, en una ocasión, Juan Ramón Jiménez, al oír por la radio a la Escolania de Montserrat cantando La mort de l´escolà se puso a llorar y dijo: “Y que yo tenga que estar en esta cárcel que es estar fuera de España”. Para él, España era aquella canción en catalán.
¿Cree que el castellano está discriminado?
No me corresponde entrar en ello pero ahí están las cifras con la proporción de ejemplares difundidos de prensa y de libros en los dos idiomas, por no hablar del mundo audiovisual.
¿Qué cambios ve en el uso del catalán en la vida cotidiana?
Todo depende de la perspectiva. Cuando Ramon Xirau volvió desde su exilio a la Barcelona de la transición, exclamó: “¡Cuánta gente hablando castellano!”. Pero otros valoran que hoy todo el mundo entiende el catalán.
El manifiesto lo firma gente de prestigio: académicos, Vargas Llosa, Pombo, Azúa…
Mi discrepancia no afecta a las relaciones de amistad. Sería muy interesante publicar una lista de quienes no han firmado. Me refiero a nombres de significación semejante que no han querido firmar, sin contar a los que al principio firmaron pero ahora han pedido que se retire su nombre. Hay más de veinte académicos que no lo hemos firmado, por ejemplo. Y la junta de gobierno de la RAE ha reafirmado por unanimidad la postura del director de no implicarse institucionalmente en esto.
El manifiesto sitúa al castellano en una jerarquía superior al catalán. ¿Qué le parece?
Lo que piden es el derecho a no saber una lengua distinta del castellano. No sé si la ignorancia es sujeto de derecho. No hay lenguas superiores a otras, el francés no es superior a ninguna otra lengua porque haya dado a Proust, el alemán no es inferior porque el nazismo se haya expresado a través suyo. Cada lengua tiene lo que tiene.
¿Le preocupa la reproducción cíclica de este debate?
Ya no. Mi impresión es que se irá encauzando por la vía política, que es su ámbito natural.
Fuente: http://www.lavanguardia.es
______________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 09:10 pm on 27th June 2008
“Los problemas de traducción se solucionan con la práctica y los esfuerzos personales”
El master en traducción Zhao Zhenjiang fue invitado el 25 de junio al foro Entrevista, de China.org.cn, para presentar sus experiencias profesionales, explorando las historias detrás de las conocidas obras literarias chinas y extranjeras. El lenguaje es un vehículo de la cultura y un puente que facilita el enlace y comprensión entre los países y pueblos del mundo. Los traductores, por su parte, son precisamente mensajeros dedicados al fomento del intercambio intercultural, que utilizan el encanto de los diferentes idiomas y letras para que China conozca el mundo y viceversa.
Citas de Zhao Zhenjiang
Hasta la fecha, creo que sigo andando a tientas. ¿Cómo se debe traducir un poema, por las diferencias entre las lenguas de China y Occidente y entre sus culturas? A mi juicio, la premisa de la traducción de poemas consiste en que si traduces las obras de un poeta de gran prestigio, la traducción en chino debe ser, por lo menos, un poema. Es mejor que al leerla, a un chino le parezca un buen poema. No obstante, no he logrado traducir muchos poemas que me hagan satisfecho.
Es igual que al interpretar un poema chino en un idioma extranjero. A veces, mientras más leo las traducciones más valentía pierdo. Por ejemplo, el famoso poeta mexicano Octavio Paz, Premio de Nóbel de Literatura en 1990, tradujo muchos poemas chinos de las dinastías Tang (618-907) y Song (960-1279). Para la primera palabra de siete caracteres “shi nian sheng si liang mang mang” del poema Jiang Cheng Zi (El hombre del pueblo del río), de Su Shi, empleó dos palabras en español. Si las retraduce en chino, la idea general será más o menos así: “En diez años, cada vez más impreciso, cada vez más remoto, entre el ser vivo y el muerto”. ¿Entendió Paz el poema chino? Sí. ¿Expresó el significado original? Sí.
Sin embargo, es imposible que un lingüista chino lo interprete en español. Esta es la razón por la que nunca me atrevo a traducir las obras literarias chinas al español. Cuando lo hago, necesito un amigo de habla hispana, con alta formación lingüística que colabore conmigo. De otra manera, aunque creamos traducir fielmente la obra original, los extranjeros no querrán leerla, pues para ellos carecerá de significado. Si quieres traducir un poema chino en lengua extranjera, primero que todo debes saber escribir versos poéticos en esa lengua. Pienso que en el círculo de español poca gente puede hacerlo, para no hablar de la creación de buenos poemas. Pero si traduces un poema extranjero, puedes no ser un poeta. Por supuesto, debes saber cómo se escriben unos versos, su rima y ritmo. Es más difícil componer cuatro tonos de chino en una armonía perfecta, alcanzando un bello sentido musical.
El lenguaje es el vehículo de la cultura y puente que facilita el enlace y comprensión entre los países y pueblos del mundo. Los traductores, por su parte, son precisamente mensajeros dedicados al fomento del intercambio intercultural, utilizando el encanto de lenguas y letras, para que China conozca el mundo, y a la vez exponer China al mundo. Que nos acerquemos a ellos, explorando las historias detrás de las conocidas obras literarias chinas y extranjeras. En la entrevista concedida por China.org.cn, el reconocido traductor Zhao Zhenjiang nos habla de sus experiencias.
Tengo muchos recuerdos impresionantes. Al comienzo, en la traducción de los nombres, vimos que en una versión en francés de Li Zhihua, todos ellos habían sido traducidos según su significado. Pero no nos parecen aceptables, pues los extranjeros consideran que los nombres chinos son muy ridículos. Primero el apellido no se traduce sino con el pinyín (el alfabeto fonético chino). Por ejemplo, el nombre de Jia Yucun, de la novela clásica Sueño en el Pabellón Rojo, luego de traducirse en español, resulta largo terminando con el apellido Jia, lo que extraña a la gente de otros países. Por ello decidimos emplear el pinyín.
Otros problemas también requieren ser solucionados de manera adecuada. Tomemos un caso. En la misma novela hay un personaje, Xiang Ling (castaña de agua). En España no existe este fruto, por lo que si insistimos en traducirlo según el texto original, debemos consultar el diccionario de botánica en latín. Si colocas un vocablo en latín en el texto en castellano, los lectores sienten posiblemente comer una piedrecilla al consumir cacahuetes y pierden la paciencia para continuar leyendo. Además, cuando busqué en el diccionario de botánica, encontré una explicación de tres tipos de castaña de agua, de dos, cuatro y cinco picos. Entonces no sabemos a qué pertenece Xiang Ling. Después de reflexionar una y otra vez, decidimos sustituirlo por el nenúfar, teniendo en cuenta su nombre cariñoso infantil, “Ying Lian” (nenúfar). Así, la traducción es aceptable. Si queremos explicar bien el significado de su nombre original, podemos poner uno en latín.
Fuente: http://spanish.china.org.cn
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 08:20 pm on 14th June 2008
entrevista , catedrático en Kiel (Alemania)
Gómez-Montero: “A los escritores les gusta conocer al traductor, es una figura que les causa respeto”
En los encuentros de Kiel estuvieron presentes Fernán-Vello y Xulio Valcárcel. En Castrillo se traducirá a Casares, a Rutherford, a Pereira, a Colinas, a De Toro, a Rivas o a Euloxio Ruibal.
El profesor Javier Gómez-Montero lleva treinta años en Alemania, pero cada verano encuentra un motivo para regresar a la tierra de sus ancestros, la Maragatería, en Astorga. Allí, desde hace tres años, se celebra, a la sombra de la villa emblemática de Castillo de los Polvazares, un encuentro peculiar, entre traductores y escritores, que se miran cara a cara, se conocen y se leen sus textos. Son unas jornada únicas, muy especiales, que este verano tendrán lugar entre el 20 y el 24 de julio.Gómez-Montero es un entusiasta increíble. Y Galicia empieza a tener un gran protagonismo en sus talleres literarios. Hace tiempo que a través del Lites (Projektgruppe für spanischsprachige Literaturen) se dedica activamente a traducir al alemán a autores españoles, dentro de su seminario de lenguas románicas de la Universidad de Kiel, a las orillas del Báltico. Hablar con él es un gran placer, porque de su boca sólo sale entusiasmo y proyectos para el futuro. “De hecho, vamos a sacar una antología de textos gallegos y leoneses más adelante, quiero que sepas que lo que vamos a hacer en Castrillo de los Polvazares (Astorga) en el mes de julio es en realidad un proyecto vinculado al Camino de Santiago a su paso por León. Pero también queremos tener en cuenta la parte galaica, el trozo que va del Cebreiro a Santiago de Compostela. Y aquí es donde la literatura gallega empieza a tener un gran protagonismo”. El germen de esta axtraordinaria actividad está en la Universidad de Kiel, de donde Gómez-Montero es catedrático. “Ya en el año 2002 empezamos unos seminarios de traducción allí”, dice “y luego, con traductores alemanes, se creo todo un taller de traduccion, naturalmente al alemás. Así que empezamos allí mismo, realizando seminarios a orillas del mar baltico, en un entorno magnífco. De ahí fueron saliendo varios proyectos: no hemos parado. Por ejemplo, el año pasado sacamos la traducción de Compostela y su ángel, también una antología de Antonio Gamoneda, otra más de poetas del siglo XX, con José Ángel Valente incluido, y por último un volumen de poesía urbana, con todas las lenguas del estado español (Fran Alonso, entre los que esciben en gallego, y otros, como César Antonio Molina…). Incluso empezamos con una antología llamada Territorios de la poesía en la que estaba el poeta Luis Tosar…”
Una actividad casi febril, pero muy gratificante. la cosa no ha dejado de crecer, y más que puede crecer en los años próximos. “Después de lo de Kiel, hace tres años, pensé en traer los talleres aquí”, comenta Gómez-Montero.
“Aparte de los seminarios en Alemania, como mi padre es de ascendencia maragata y yo tengo mucha relación con la tierra, para qué negarlo, y considerando que siempre hemos contado con la gran ayuda y apoyo del Ayuntamiento de Astorga y de la Dirección General del Libro, parimos esta nueva idea. Como tú sabes, porque lo concoes bien, Castrillo de los Polvazares es un entorno magnífico, pero además está el lado simbólico: porque la maragateria es tierra de fronteras, es cruce de caminos, tiene además una importante tradición cultural… Y luego, bueno, luego se trata de un sitio ideal para retirarse en verano, y hasta mi familia tiene una casa aquí (y yo también me he hecho una [risas])… Así que es un placer como pocos venir, estar con los amigos, traducir y hacer talleres con escritores y traductores en una atmósfera deliciosa… en fin, qué te puede decir. Lo que está claro es que tenemos un gran apoyo del Ayuntamiento de Astorga, con el alcalde Juan José A. Perandones al frente: apoya mucho el Camino de Santiago y cuanto se hace en torno a él. Pero tampoco quiero obviar el apoyo de la Xunta de Galicia, de Turismo, a través de Rubén Lois… también nos ayudó mucho cuando hicimos la traducción de Torrente que te mencionaba al principio. Pero hay que reconocer que todo esto se debe también a que la Universidad de Kiel tiene relaciones muy intensas con la de Santiago, y, ahora a través del Instituto Amergin de Estudios Irlandeses, con A Coruña, claro está.
El poeta Fernán-Vello habla con su traductor a la lengua alemana en una sesión al aire libre, en Sehlendorf. |
Los Encuentros de traductores y escritores buscan sobre todo la internacionalidad. Y, por supuesto, la interculturalidad. No han dejado de crecer en estos tres años, y han logrado arrastrar a figuras de primerísimo nivel. Este año, sin ir más lejos, acudirán poetas como Antonio Colinas, Luis Alberto de Cuenca, José Luis Puerto, Antonio Pereira, Luis Martínez de Merlo, Andrés Martínez Oria, Mercedes Gómez Blesa o Marifé Santiago Bolaños, críticos y académicos como John Rutherford, de la Universidad de Oxford, traductor también de autores gallegos, o novelistas bien conocidos, como el propio Antonio Pereira y el compostelano Suso de Toro. Todos ellos estarán al lado de sus traductores al alemán, al francés y al inglés, y comentarán con ellos las versiones y las dificultades traductológicas. Susanne Lange, junto a el profesor John Rutherford, hablarán como es natural de la traducción inglesa del Quijote, moderados por Román Álvarez, otro experto en traducción, de la Universidad de Salamanca. Un programa de lujo en el que no faltarán traductores jóvenes y una mirada a textos de, además de los citados más arriba y que estarán presentes, otros escritores muy relevantes, como Carlos Casares, Euloxio Ruibal, Manolo Rivas, Arturo Franco Taboada, al lado de autores leoneses como Raúl Guerra Garrido, Juan Carlos Mestre, Tomás Álvarez, Merino, Gamoneda, Luis Mateo Díez y Martínez Reñones. Hasta Álvaro Cunqueiro está en la lista previa de esta futura antología, con, como es lógico, El pasajero en Galicia: Amergin, de la Universidade da Coruña, se encargará de la versión en inglés.
La idea de la internacionalización y la mezcla de culturas siempres estuvo en el ánimo del profesor Gómez-Montero. “Porque no se trata de trabajar sólo con autores gallegos y leoneses”, afirma. “Mi proyecto, desde el principio, era hacer algo nacional, pero siempre con una fuerte proyección internacional. Por ponerte un ejemplo, la primera vez, hace tres años, vino Clara Janés, y también estuvo Luis Mateo Diez. En la segunda edición los talleres se celebraron con SánchezRobayna y con Olvido García Valdés. Ahora, por cierto, he de decirlo antes de que se me olvide, sacamos una antología traducida de Ángel González… Pero bueno, confieso que la proximidad y la influencia del territorio, es inevitable. Así que viene mucha gente próxima a estas tierras claro, y de Galicia y de León, evidentemente. No podemos dejar de lado que éste es un proyecto relacionado con el Camino de Santiago. Es un proyecto del Ministerio de Cultura, y en él, como es natural, tanto leoneses como gallegos son fundamentales. Este año estoy muy ilusionado, creo que esta combinación de traductores y autores va a funcionar muy bien… y además así respondemos a las líneas maestras del Proyecto Europeo de Tradución, que es un grupo internacional y multidisciplinar.
¿Qué seguirá a todo esto? Un proceso traductológico, investigación intercultural y una publicación, que se hará en volúmenes separados, cada uno en un idioma, de una selección de textos, muchos de ellos de los autores que van a estar presente en Castrillo de los Polvazares. “Este tercer encuentro de escritores y traductores supone un claro avance. Hemos aumentado mucho. Tenemos una gran cantidad de gente dsipuesta a venir, a participar, a traducir. Es estupendo”, dice el siempre entusiasta y decidido Gómez-Montero. “Siempre pensé que el encuentro era muy fructífero por muchas razones, no sólo por las razones culturales, sino porque es un lugar de amistad, de convivencia, de intercambio. Hasta ahora hemos sacado sólo libros traducidos al alemán, y se están preparando, como te dije, el de Ángel González y también el de Robayna… pero también quiero publicar un libro sobre la traducción literaria… y, por supuesto, vamos a multiplicarnos, con el francés y el inglés. Eso a partir de estas jornadas de julio. Por eso elegí a Antonio de Toro y al grupo de la Universidade da Coruña. Básicamente pensé en un grupo para completar la tercera pata del proyecto, la del inglés… había varias opciones, y pronto encontré una base en la Universidade da Coruña: Antonio me daba todas las garantías y más sus referentes académicos, que son magníficos. Y sobre todo la cercanía y la buena sintonía, porque verás, en esto de la traducción hace falta entenderse bien, hay que llegar a estar de acuerdo y por eso es bueno trabajar con amigos. Lo cierto es que Galicia va a estar muy presente a partir de ahora, en el apartado de la traducción al inglés y en el de los autores gallegos”.
En Kiel las jornadas van hacia el alemán. “Bueno, Kiel es la forja. Este año tuvimos a Luciano Rodríguez, Fernán-Vello, Xuli0 Valcálcarcel, al propio Anotnio de Toro. Hicimos talleres, colocamosc al escritor con sus traductores: ya sabes, esta es un poco la metodología. Cosas muy prácticas sacar para sacar poemas adelante. El seminario de Kiel acabó en la Casa de la literatura, en la que se leyeron cinco traducciones de cada poeta… espero que de ahí salga un libro más, dedicado a autores gallegos, un libro en el que creo que trabajaremos fundamentalmente desde Galicia, como es natural, y que presentaremos ahí”.
Javier Gómez-Montero no tiene dudas. La fórmula de los encuentros, como el de Kiel o el de Castrillo de los Polvazares, es perfecta, y la producción científica resultante, asombrosa. “Bueno, es un trabajo que compensa y el trato directo con los escritores es siempre muy gratificante. Porque verás, es que se penen firmes ante la figura del traductor.., el traductor les causa muchísimo respeto… esto no se comprende fácilmente desde la investigación solitaria, desde la Teoría de la Literatura… es importante escuchar al traductor, estar en contacto con él, porque es quien palpa los textos con toda su materialidad… eso es lo importante. Yo me siento muy feliz cada vez que vengo. No sólo porque organizamos esto, sino porque es volver a la tierra, y es que no olvides que yo llevo más de 30 años en Alemania… que se dice pronto. Y luego está el éxito. Los autores que conseguimos… No sé, ni sé yo cómo lo hacemos… Pero hay gente que quiere repetir, a lo mejor es porque la fórmula de trabajo de traductor con escritor es una fórmula interesante y además está la experiencia de internacionalidad. En cuanto sacas a los intelectuales de su ámbito, descubres que están felices y extraordinariamente relajados”, concluye.
Fuente: http://www.elcorreogallego.es
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 08:55 pm on 13th June 2008
Catherine Germann. Traductora e intérprete « El bajo nivel de idiomas es fatal para el turismo »
Aunque resulte difícil creerlo (vuelvan a mirar la fotografía sobre estas líneas), Catherine Germann cumplió 60 años hace pocos días. Esta parisina formada en los Estados Unidos es la responsable de traducir del inglés y el francés numerosos actos en el Ayuntamiento, el Centro de Arte Contemporáneo, el Museo Picasso… Se podría decir que es la traductora oficial de la ciudad. Cada vez que un artista, un actor o un empresario extranjero presenta un actividad en Málaga, allí está Catherine, que lleva casi cuatro décadas entre nosotros y que tiene a Christine Picasso entre sus ´clientes habituales´. Se considera una malagueña de adopción y afirma que el habla de los malagueños “es todo un arte”.
-¿Cómo siendo de París y habiendo estudiado en los Estados Unidos acabó en Málaga?
-Pues lo típico, por amor. ¿Qué hace aquí una guiri sino es porque está enamorada de un malagueño? [risas] Era el año 1969 y yo estudiaba en París, y mi hermana en Madrid, donde conoció a una familia andaluza. En mis vacaciones, fui a ver a mi hermana y decidimos buscar el sol de Málaga. Y ahí empezó todo. Seis meses más tarde volví a Málaga… ¡para casarme!
-¿Así inició su aprendizaje de español?
-Efectivamente. Había estudiado un poco de español en la universidad durante seis meses intensivos. Pero cuando vine a Málaga me di cuenta de la realidad: llegué a creer que aquí se hablaba otro idioma. Al principio pensaba: qué raro, estamos en España, pero aquí no hablan lo que yo he estudiado. No era capaz de reconocer ni una palabra. Entonces, recién casada, me dediqué a aprender español. Y también trabajé como profesora de inglés.
-¿Qué es lo que más trabajo le costó aprender?
-Al principio tardé tres años en aprender a decir zanahoria. Siempre decía ´carota´, porque en inglés es ´carrot´. Iba al mercado y pedía un kilo de ´carotas´. Y no veas la risa de los dependientes. Mis amigos se ríen mucho cuando les pregunto… Un día, después de consultar el diccionario, pregunté si la palabra gilipollas significaba realmente flojo de pene… Todavía me lo recuerdan entre risas.
-¿Y qué opinión tiene del ´dialecto´ malagueño?
-Lo que más me sorprende del habla malagueña es su diversidad. Es increíble la expresividad de las personas. Yo lo llamo arte. Me encanta oír a la gente en el autobús o cuando voy andando por la calle. Me encanta escuchar cómo se expresan.
-¿Pero habrá ocasiones en las que le será muy complicado traducirlos?
-En interpretación hablamos a veces de imposibilidad. En ocasiones, hay expresiones que no se pueden reproducir porque no existe el referente en la otra lengua. En ese caso hay que intentar aproximarse al contexto y saber interpretar lo que se quiere decir. Porque muchas veces puede ocasionar un malentendido y dar pie a una situación incómoda.
-Seguro que ya sabrá que los malagueños no andan muy bien de inglés…
-No sé si los malagueños son peor que el resto de los españoles. Lo que está claro es todo es una cuestión de hábitos. Yo he tenido alumnos a los que he intentado enseñar inglés y que nunca habían salido al extranjero. La educación es fundamental. En España se ha intentado durante muchos años enseñar inglés en español, que no es muy útil. Ahora, con el método de inmersión en el idioma desde edades tempranas es mucho más efectivo.
-¿No cree que en la Costa del Sol, donde el turismo es un elemento tan importante, la barrera del idioma debería estar superada?
-Creo que los idiomas son muy importantes, sobre todo cuando hablamos de la calidad por el turismo. Me pongo muchas veces en la piel del extranjero que viene por turismo y en las dificultades que encuentra. Eso es fatal. El turismo es todavía algo que se considera una fuente de ingreso pero a la vez como una cosa ajena. Por otro lado, creo que Málaga está cambiando y está potenciando el turismo más allá del sol y la playa. Pienso que es extraordinario, por ejemplo, poder pasear por la Alcazaba y ver el Palacio de Bellavista reconvertido en Museo Picasso.
-¿No es vergonzoso que el presidente del Gobierno y el alcalde de Málaga no sean capaces de hablar inglés?
-El alcalde habla francés y tiene un buen nivel. Yo ahora, cada vez que le veo, le hablo sólo en inglés. Tiene mucho interés en mejorar su nivel, aunque no tiene tiempo. Pero tiene una voluntad de hierro y mucha voluntad de comunicación.
-¿Y cómo se lleva con Christine Picasso?
-Es una mujer maravillosa. Me encanta escucharla hablar. Se expresa estupendamente y utiliza muy bien el idioma. Además, es una persona muy llana y que está encantada con Málaga.
Fuente: http://www.laopiniondemalaga.es
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 08:40 pm on 13rd June 2008
La traducción automática se orienta sobre todo a Internet y los textos técnicos
Entrevista con Mike Dillinger, Presidente de la Association for Machine Translation in the Americas
Como todas las tecnologías, la traducción automática tiene sus limitaciones, señala en la siguiente entrevista Mike Dillinger, Presidente de la Association for Machine Translation in the Americas y profesor adjunto del departamento de Psicología de la San José State University. Mike Dillinger ha estado en la Facultad de Informática de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid invitado por el Departamento de Inteligencia Artificial, impartiendo un curso sobre paráfrasis y minería de textos. Considera que la traducción automática necesita textos limpios y claros para funcionar bien y que, a pesar de los avances tecnológicos, siempre se necesitarán traductores humanos para textos legales o literarios. La Traducción Automática, añade, se orienta principalmente a Internet y textos técnicos. La tendencia de la TA hacia Internet implica entrenar a los que crean contenidos web para que puedan ser traducidos automáticamente.
El estado del arte es un estado de muchísimos cambios. Hace quince o veinte años se introdujo un enfoque nuevo que tuvo consecuencias muy importantes. Nuestro problema principal en aquella época tenía dos partes: costaba mucho tiempo y mucho dinero desarrollar las reglas gramaticales necesarias para analizar la frase original y las reglas de “transferencia” o traducción; y parecía imposible abarcar manualmente la vasta variedad de palabras y tipos de frases en los documentos.
El nuevo enfoque utiliza técnicas estadísticas para identificar reglas cualitativamente más simples pero lo hace rápidamente, automáticamente, y en amplísima escala para abarcar mucho más de la lengua. Técnicas semejantes se utilizan para identificar términos y sus posibles traducciones.
¡Son avances enormes! Antes se desarrollaban los sistemas de forma artesanal; ahora se hace de forma industrial. Hoy las investigaciones intentan aumentar la complejidad cualitativa de las reglas para reflejar mejor las estructuras sintácticas y los aspectos del significado. Se recuperan los avances cualitativos del enfoque anterior.
– Desde los años 70 se vienen utilizando sistemas de traducción automática. ¿Ha alcanzado esta tecnología su grado de madurez?
Si se entiende madurez para utilización en aplicaciones industriales, sí, sin duda. La TA es ampliamente utilizada desde hace 30 años por instituciones industriales y militares de primer nivel. La Comunidad Europea, Ford, SAP, Symantec, las Fuerzas Aéreas Norteamericanas y muchas otras organizaciones la utilizan todos los días.
Ahora bien, si se entiende madurez para su utilización por el público que introduce cualquier frase para ser traducida, no, igualmente sin duda. Como todas las tecnologías, la traducción automática tiene sus limitaciones. No se espera de un Mercedes que marche bien en la nieve o en la arena: necesita una autovía para alcanzar su mejor rendimiento, o un vehiculo diferente. Tampoco se espera de un Fórmula1 que gane un rally utilizando gasolina común o alcohol. Necesita un combustible especial.
Desgraciadamente, muchas veces se espera una traducción perfecta de un texto poco claro y lleno de errores. Por el momento, la traducción automática necesita textos limpios y correctos para funcionar bien.
– ¿Cree que la TA es bien comprendida por la sociedad?
¡De ninguna manera! Lo veo muy frecuentemente. Muchos entienden por “traducción” algo como adivinar los pensamientos del autor aún cuando éste no se haya expresado clara y correctamente.
Así muchos tienen expectativas exageradas de lo que podría hacer un sistema de traducción. Con eso, siempre quedan decepcionados. Por otro lado, los que trabajamos con TA necesitamos hacer muchos esfuerzos para que la sociedad entienda mejor para qué sirve y cuando funciona bien: es el mandato específico de la Asociación que presido.
– ¿De qué se trata: de hacer programas, sistemas de traducción, traducción computerizada, de fabricar diccionarios electrónicos…? ¿Cómo definiría exactamente esta disciplina?
Se trata de hacer sistemas informatizados de traducción. Eso incluye, claro, construir diccionarios electrónicos, gramáticas, bases de datos de co-ocurrencias de palabras, y otros recursos lingüísticos. Pero también incluye desarrollar procesos de evaluación automática de traducciones, procesos de “limpiar” y analizar los textos de entrada, y procesos para garantizar que todo marchará bien cuando llegue un pedido para traducir 300,000 páginas de una vez. Como son procesos y componentes muy diferentes, exige la colaboración de lingüistas, programadores e ingenieros.
– ¿De qué etapas consta el proceso de traducción automatizada?
1. Preparación de los documentos. Quizá la etapa más importante, pues hay que asegurar que las frases de cada documento se comprenden bien y están correctas.
2. Adaptación del sistema de traducción. De la misma forma que ocurre con un traductor humano, el sistema de traducción automatizada necesita informaciones acerca de todas las palabras que encontrará en los documentos. Se le pueden “enseñar” otras palabras por un proceso que se llama personalización (en inglés “customization”).
3. Traducción de los documentos. Cada formato de documento, como Word, pdf o HTML, tiene muchas características diferentes, además de las frases que interesan para la traducción. En esta etapa, se separan las frases del formato en el que están, por ejemplo.
4. Verificación de las traducciones. El control de calidad es muy importante para traductores humanos y automáticos. Ni las palabras ni las frases tienen un sólo sentido, así es que es muy fácil entenderlas de una manera diferente de lo que se pretende.
5. Distribución de los documentos. Ésta es una etapa más compleja de lo que comúnmente se piensa. Cuando salen 10.000 documentos para traducir en 10 lenguas diferentes, verificar que todos fueron traducidos, ponerlos todos en el orden correcto sin mezclar las lenguas, etc., exige mucha organización.
– ¿Constituye esta tecnología una amenaza para el trabajo de los intérpretes humanos? ¿Cree que aumenta realmente los puestos de trabajo?
¡De ninguna manera constituye una amenaza! La TA quita de las manos del traductor humano lo más rutinario para que pueda aplicar sus conocimientos especializados en lo mas difícil. Siempre necesitaremos traductores humanos para textos legales, literarios, textos mas complejos.
Por otro lado, la TA hoy día se aplica más a situaciones en las que los humanos no participan. Sería incluso cruel poner personas a traducir correos electrónicos, chats, mensajes SMS y páginas Web aleatorias. El volumen de textos es tan grande y la velocidad de traducción que exigen son tales, que sería una tortura para un humano. Es cuestión de escala: un traductor humano normal produce de 8 a 10 páginas traducidas por día. A escala web, 8 a 10 páginas por segundo sería poquísimo.
La introducción de nuevas tecnologías raras veces aumenta los puestos de trabajo, mucho menos en una economía global. Lo que hace es crear una diferencia cada vez más nítida entre trabajos rutinarios que exigen pocos conocimientos y los trabajos especializados.
– La implantación de esta tecnología, ¿es un problema técnico o un problema social?
Sobretodo es un problema de ingeniería social porque las personas tienen que cambiar sus comportamientos y su modo de ver las cosas. El proceso de la TA sigue exactamente las mismas etapas de la traducción humana, con dos diferencias principales:
a) En los sistemas de traducción hay que tener muchísimo más cuidado con la redacción. Los traductores humanos utilizan sus conocimientos técnicos (cuando los hay) para compensar los fallos de redacción, pero los sistemas de traducción automatizada no tienen esos conocimientos: reflejan demasiado fielmente los fallos del texto inicial. Es difícil conseguir que se traduzca más fielmente, pero hoy día hay herramientas de revisión automática que ayudan muchísimo. Symantec es un ejemplo reciente que utiliza un revisor automático y un sistema de traducción para alcanzar resultados rapidísimos y buenísimos.
b) En los sistemas de traducción hay que trabajar con muchísimos documentos traducidos. ¿Qué pasa si, en vez de 50 documentos traducidos a la semana, una organización recibe 5.000? Automatizar el proceso de traducción acaba por revelar que otras partes del manejo de documentos tienen problemas.
– Usted habla de que el British Nacional Corpus, que recoge un conjunto relacionado de textos representativos de la lengua inglesa, tiene 15 millones de términos diferentes, pero que los diccionarios de traducción automática sólo tienen 300.000 términos. ¿Cómo superar esta barrera a la hora de edificar un sistema de TA aceptable para la sociedad?
Esta colección de más de 100 millones de palabras en inglés refleja muy bien las características macro de la lengua. Una es ésta: se utilizan muchísimas palabras. Sin embargo, su frecuencia es radicalmente diferente: de los 15 millones de términos, ¡el 70% sólo se utiliza pocas veces!
Para superar la “barrera” de la variabilidad del vocabulario, hoy día se utilizan las palabras más frecuentes para crear un sistema de base al que se agregan de 5.000 a 10.00 palabras específicas para cada cliente comercial. Funciona bastante bien.
Para aplicaciones web, eso simplemente no funciona. Faltan, incluso en los mejores sistemas, literalmente millones de palabras, sin contar que nuevas palabras son inventadas a cada día. Hay por lo menos tres remedios actuales: pedirle al usuario “intentar otra vez” la traducción, pedirle al usuario que introduzca un sinónimo, y construir automáticamente o semi-automáticamente bases de datos de sinónimos.
A mi modo de ver, tendremos que desarrollar sistemas para “guiar” al autor de contenidos web, como ya existen para contenidos técnicos. Hay fuertes presiones económicas para ir en esa dirección.
– La Association for Machine Translation in the Americas que usted preside organiza la conferencia AMTA 2008, que se celebrará el próximo octubre en Hawai. ¿Qué novedades se aportarán en esta conferencia?
¡Las hay siempre! ¡Hay que ir para verlas! Una cosa diferente que se hace esta vez es juntar conferencias de varios grupos. No es una sola conferencia. En el mismo hotel, en la misma semana, tendremos AMTA, el Workshop internacional de la traducción del Habla (IWSLT), un Workshop del órgano del gobierno americano NIST sobre cómo evaluar los métodos de evaluación de traducción, un encuentro de la Localization Industry Standards Association que trae representantes de grandes empresas, y otro grupo de investigadores del congreso Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP). Finalmente, como será en Hawai, nuestros colegas de Asia vendrán para que sea aún mas internacional. Pueden mantenerse informados en la página de web del congreso. Esta entrevista se publicó originalmente en la web la Facultad de Informática de la Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Se reproduce con autorización.
Fuente: http://www.tendencias21.net
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 11:05 pm on 19th June 2008
Entrevista al filólogo Joan Veny
Joan Veny, Filólogo. ´Deseo que el catalán sea una lengua normal´
Dedicado a la investigación y a la docencia, reivindica el fomento del idioma propio apelando a la confianza
Joan Veny i Clar (Campos, 1932) es catedrático emérito de la Universitat de Barcelona desde el año 2002. Experto dialectólogo, acumula obras y reconocimientos. Trabaja intensamente y mantiene gran interés por las cuestiones idiomáticas. Admite estar preocupado por la inmigración masiva y el retroceso del uso social del catalán, aunque se muestra confiado en que haya nuevos “milagros” que favorezcan a la lengua.
-¿Qué significa para usted la lengua catalana, es un sentimiento, una devoción?
-Sí, en principio es un sentimiento profundo, que difícilmente se puede expresar. Parecerá extraño, pero filólogo quiere decir que ama las palabras, que las maneja, acaricia, y en el momento de definir un concepto puede resultar que le falten estas palabras, es como un contrasentido. Pero sí, es un sentimiento hacia una lengua milenaria, que no es simplemente una lengua de pastores, sino que es una lengua de cultura, que detrás tiene una literatura brillante.
-Numerosas publicaciones y alrededor de 350 contribuciones diversas sobre dialectología, geolingüística, etimología, historia de la lengua, onomástica, cultura popular, etc. ¿Es consciente del exhaustivo y riguroso legado que está dejando?
-El secreto de un investigador es el trabajo, dedicar muchas horas, y naturalmente tener una formación en las materias básicas. Yo he compartido la investigación con la enseñanza y he disfrutado. En mi caso, no he podido hacer la labor de investigación con la intensidad que hubiera querido porque tenía una dedicación docente, que también necesita preparación. Ahora puedo decir que después de la jubilación me siento más libre y tengo muchas más horas, y continúo trabajando con intensidad. Un investigador estricto, que se limita al trabajo de búsqueda de su campo, cerrado en su laboratorio o despacho, hace una labor importante, sin duda, pero la posibilidad de transmitir algunos de sus hallazgos a los alumnos me parece muy positivo, porque los alumnos no son idiotas, tu les explicas una cosa y esto cala en su espíritu y es objeto de reflexión y origina preguntas.
-Mantiene pues una actitud de respeto hacia los estudiantes.
-Siempre he aprendido mucho de los alumnos. Nunca me ha gustado escuchar a esos profesores que les menosprecian, que si son unos animales y no saben nada, etc. Es una simplificación sin sentido.
-¿En qué situación se encuentra actualmente la lengua catalana; avanza o retrocede su uso social?
-Realmente es una pregunta que nos hacemos a menudo. Últimamente, en estos cuatro o cinco últimos años, me siento bastante pesimista y diré por qué. Durante la posguerra vino aquí una inmigración muy importante, de murcianos, andaluces, etc., y curiosamente no tenían ocasión de aprender el catalán en la escuela, ni de escucharlo en la radio, la televisión… Pero a través de la segunda y tercera generación asistimos a una catalanización; una asimilación de esta gente a la lengua y a la cultura del país. Realmente una cosa milagrosa, porque no tenían ocasión de practicar esta lengua ya que el catalán estaba prohibido, pero hoy Cataluña, las Illes Balears y el País Valencià están llenos de gente que se llama Pérez, Fernández, Ordóñez y Rodríguez, etc., que se sienten más catalanes que los propios nativos. Por lo tanto, se habían dado unos pasos importantes y parecía que esto era una victoria, y no. Ahora resulta que a raíz de la mundialización ya asistimos a una inmigración masiva que tiene lugar no sólo en las ciudades como pasaba anteriormente sino en los pueblos más pequeños. Entonces, esta gente si tiene que aprender una lengua aprenderá la más grande, la más prestigiosa, que es el castellano, de esto no hay dudas. Y además, muchos de estos inmigrantes son de procedencia latinoamericana y por lo tanto llevan una lengua desde su país, y eso de que en España se habla español pues ya está, parece que tienen la vida resuelta desde el punto de vista lingüístico. Y las cosas no son así, el Estado español es un país plurilingüe, donde hay además del castellano otras lenguas que son cooficiales: el vasco, el gallego, el catalán y claro, se trata de que la gente aprenda esta lengua, que se integren, sin desintegrarse, no quiero decir esto de que familiarmente tengan que renunciar a su propia lengua, no, naturalmente, esto sería suicida, pedir demasiado.
-Pero hay que defender la lengua propia.
-Es un derecho colectivo, defender, hacer lo posible desde un punto de vista individual e institucional para que esta lengua propia, repito, lengua propia sólo hay una que es el catalán, pues continúe su vida y no aparezca como una lengua a extinguir. Tenemos que tener un poco de confianza, aunque sea una inmigración masiva pensemos en esta capacidad de orgullo de la lengua, de los catalanoparlantes. Y es que el uso social actual realmente da escalofríos, impresiona enormemente. Hay mucho por hacer, se está trabajando, hay parejas lingüísticas que contribuyen a esta difusión de la lengua propia, pero tendremos que dejar pasar una generación al menos para que los hijos de esta gente que ha llegado se pase al catalán, pero es difícil. Veo muchas dificultades.
-¿Un deseo de cara al futuro respecto a la lengua catalana?
-Que sea una lengua normal, con todo lo que esto quiere significar.
-Esto quiere decir que ahora no lo es.
-No, aún no lo es. Y las perspectivas como ya había dicho no son del todo halagüeñas. Es decir, que puedas vivir con normalidad en catalán. El Gobierno central siempre se muestra receloso, y fuera del área idiomática catalana no debería haber esta actitud tan negativa respecto al catalán. Y si las relaciones entre Cataluña y Balears son fluidas, correctas, cordiales, sinceras, me gustaría que con Valencia ocurriese lo mismo.
-¿Tendría que haber una mayor autoestima y conciencia colectiva?
-Seguramente se ha perdido un poco de autoestima. Y ser monolingüe es lo más triste que le puede pasar a una persona. Lo natural es aprender, saber otras lenguas. Conocer otras lenguas quiere decir conocer la cultura, la civilización del país, y eso enseña a ser más liberales, más comprensivos.
-¿Qué les diría a aquellas personas que no aceptan la unidad de la lengua?
-Tendrían que hacer un cursillo de lingüística, impartido con un profesor que sepa de qué va, que no tenga ideas preconcebidas y que explique que todas las lenguas tienen una cara hablada y una cara escrita. La falta de distinción es lo que hace confundir.
-En el 800 aniversario del nacimiento de Jaume I, ¿qué opinión le merece?
-Fue un gran monarca, admirable por aquel Llibre del fets, que es una maravilla. Un hombre que tenía un extraordinario sentido de la política. La lástima fue, quizás, para algunos, que después de repartir los territorios a sus hijos hubo estas autonomías y probablemente ha sido el origen de estas disensiones… Pero en fin, vale la pena dedicarle un sentido recuerdo a este gran monarca.
Fuente: http://www.diariodemallorca.es
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 10:55 pm on 10th June 2008
UK: Translation Services Manager most ‘crucial’ member of police team
Chief Constable Julie Spence is singing the praises of one of the most ‘crucial’ members of her Cambridgeshire policing team. Not a brilliant detective or a resourceful community liaison officer, instead she goes by the title of Translation Services Manager.
‘She speaks five languages, and used to work as a translator for us,’ Mrs Spence explains. ‘When everything started running away with us, I got her in to help recruit community support officers with language skills. She has been invaluable. In fact, I gave her an award the other day.
‘At one point, when we were buying in the vast majority of our translation services, I realised the bill was going to reach £1 million, but she managed it down, mostly by making sure we can handle 20 languages in-house. We still have to buy in translation services for the other 70-odd languages, but the bill isn’t as crippling as it could have been.’
Hold on a minute. A near £1million translation budget? The need to ‘handle’ 90-plus languages?
But Mrs Spence is a senior officer in a largely rural county, who should surely be dealing with the business of, er, policing, not translating. What is she talking about?
Mrs Spence gives a wry smile. ‘Four years ago, I wouldn’t have had a clue about any of this either. I wouldn’t even have been able to tell you what a translation services manager was, much less why we would need one. Now we just couldn’t manage without her.’
This throwaway reference to constabulary admin is a graphic illustration of the demands of modern policing. In short, the Cambridgeshire force needs to be able to police in nearly 100 languages, because – for better or worse – the county’s residents today speak nearly 100 languages.
Since the EU gates effectively opened in 2004, the population of Cambridgeshire alone has swelled by at least a million. And the figures, as well as just about every other aspect of this seismic social change, are a matter of much debate.
On the frontline, as ever, was the local police service. Practically overnight, Mrs Spence’s officers experienced a surge in crime – as you would expect, she is at pains to point out, whenever a huge mass of people, of whatever nationality, arrive within a short space of time.
Then, curious patterns began to emerge. Drink driving was up, and officers noticed that more and more of those they arrested were of Eastern European descent.
Knife crime became a huge issue, with knives being pulled to settle almost feudal arguments.
Brothels started to appear, with all the associated unpleasantries, such as people-trafficking and kidnapping.
Exploitation of workers was next, running alongside the sort of antisocial behaviour that comes with ghettoised areas, cramped living conditions and transient communities.
As a sociological study, Mrs Spence notes, it is fascinating stuff. But she was having to deal with it all on a daily basis, and with one massive and expensive complication: she and her officers could not communicate with many of those committing the crimes, or their victims.
‘In some ways it sounds so trivial, going on and on about the language issue, but it was stopping us from doing our job. I’m sure there have been things we missed. There were times when inequalities of service did come about.
‘I am thinking of things like stop and search operations. How do you do that with Polish youths, when your officers don’t speak Polish and getting hold of translators is such a time-consuming business.
‘I know some of my officers will have thought: “It’s easier not to stop this one.”
‘I know for a fact that we nearly messed up on one serious case, a rape, because of translation issues. It was only by chance, when a translator arrived as the victim was about to leave the station, that we realised the seriousness of the situation.
‘I have simply no idea how many other things might have slipped through the net.’
Who could blame her officers for being frustrated, both by the need to stop and call for translation back-up at every turn and by the realisation that those translators were being paid more than them?
‘That money was diverted from daily management of the force, and was at the expense of staff and organisational flexibility,’ says Mrs Spence, matter-of-factly.
‘Our resources were already stretched to the point where we simply weren’t able to do our job. And the figures for translation just kept going up and up.’
Even she balked at the prospect of £1million. I ask her what she would traditionally expect to get for that sort of money.
‘Twenty or 30 extra officers,’ she says. ‘That is the reality of the sort of choices we have been forced to make.’ And are still being forced to make.
‘Recently, we stopped a lorry containing illegal immigrants, including two minors among them. You can just imagine the sort of workload that created, having to get translators in, sorting out child protection issues.
And even the most straightforward parts of policing – what I call the noncrime parts, which actually make up two-thirds of our work – are hugely complicated by the language issue.
‘Things like briefing a parent on their responsibilities under the law, or even knocking on a door to see if a little old lady is OK, are made very difficult if your officers cannot communicate.’
Today, Mrs Spence admits she doesn’t speak any languages other than English. ‘And gobbledegook,’ she adds, with an arched eyebrow and a wry smile. ‘Some would say I talk that.’
By ‘some’ she means Left-wing politicians, most recently Barbara Follett, government minister with responsibility for the East of England, Mrs Spence’s patch.
The two have clashed over the immigration issue. Mrs Spence believes it is her duty to highlight how her officers have struggled to cope with the demands placed on them and has, for some time, been vocal with her concerns.
She has accused the Government of burying its head in the sand over the issues posed by the migrant population explosion, of patronising those who dare voice concern, and of downplaying the true numbers involved.
This week, she was called to give evidence to a Commons Select Committee and spoke candidly, and controversially, about issues such as knife crime, singling out specific nationalities involved, in a terribly un-PC way.
On a recent visit to Peterborough, however, Mrs Follett suggested the chief constable was talking through her hat, and that the Government was on top of the situation.
‘We have a pretty good idea exactly how many migrants there are, and what we tell the public is the truth,’ Mrs Follett said. She went on to call Mrs Spence’s stance ‘outdated’. All of which Mrs Spence takes as another governmental ‘pat on the head’.
‘They keep saying the situation is settling down. My experience is not showing that. Our evidence is that the number of Poles being arrested is up 50 per cent on last year. The situation might be changing, but I’m not sure we can say it is improving.
‘Each new development brings new issues, new languages, new problems. At the minute we are seeing young men who pass themselves off as Poles – and therefore entitled to be here – but they are speaking Russian.
‘The latest wave are the Czechs and Slovaks, and we have been seeing a lot of Albanians over the past six to nine months. We are also seeing a completely new Egyptian influx.
‘Every day we are discovering new challenges. This is the age of supermobility, and we are on the frontline. It’s not all a problem – in fact, the vast majority of it is very positive – but in policing terms, it is a massive challenge, and I think that should be recognised.’
She has no problem singling out nationalities and explaining how they fit into the crime picture in her area, but is angry at being condemned for that.
‘I was specifically asked at the Select Committee what nationalities were carrying knives. I don’t have a problem with discussing it. It is something we had to look at, as a police force, in order to do something about it.’
It was the Iraqi Kurds who were first highlighted as a group with a tendency to carry knives. ‘In Iraq they carry a knife for self-protection, so we found that many of the young Iraqi men did the same here, and if there was a feudal dispute the knife was pulled.
‘Then we started seeing the same thing with the Lithuanians and the Poles, again because it was something they did back home for protection.
‘But we did a lot of work with all these communities. We produced leaflets and we have seen a huge reduction in the levels of knife crime.
We tackled the problem, but to do that we had to recognise that there was a problem in the first place.’
And she’s not na’ve enough to think that the problem has fully gone away.
‘We are seeing the circle of racism come back round again, and with it anti-social behaviour, name-calling. The intelligence is that some of the new communities are now rearming themselves because of this perceived threat from racism, so we have to be very alive to it and we need to get back in there.
‘That’s why I have my officers collecting intelligence and telling us, so we can stop it escalating into something worse.’
So it is, too, she says, with the other big migrant crime ‘issue’ – drink driving. Mrs Spence says it may not be politically correct to say that this is a huge problem among the new communities, but the fact is that it is.
‘It’s something we are largely on top of in the British population, Eastern Europeans, however, think it is their right to drink copious amounts of vodka, then drive.
‘I don’t accept that there is a huge issue with people coming over here to deliberately flout our laws, but there is a problem with ignorance.’
You can see why all this is contentious stuff, designed to have the Barbara Folletts of this world fleeing the TV studio. Knife-wielding Slovaks? Vodka-slugging Poles? It’s all terribly easily exploitable. The BNP has already tried to hijack some of Mrs Spence’s concerns and dress them up as their own.
Isn’t she anxious about speaking out on the hottest political subject in Britain?
‘No, I don’t think so. For so long it was the big elephant in the room. But eventually I had to voice my concerns.
‘At first, I think it was seen as simply a plea for more money. It was, of course, we were woefully underfunded, but it was also about the principle. We were simply not prepared for inward migration on this scale, and the Government needs to learn lessons from that.
‘For goodness sake, it’s not a case of saying “let’s send them home”. The fact is we need migrants here. Our big hospital, Addenbrooke’s, wouldn’t survive without them.
‘But it’s precisely because we don’t talk about this that we are in trouble. The debates we have about the whole issue in this country are very superficial.
People don’t understand that it is a very complex matter. It isn’t just: Migrants – good or bad? Or Crime – yes or no?
‘The whole way we police is at issue here. Of ten people we hold in our cells, generally four will be from another country.
‘That’s the reality.’ Of course, the migrant population itself is only part of the problem. The inevitable clashes with native Brits, many of whom are of immigrant origin themselves, she points out, create more headaches.
‘It’s not necessarily racism, as such, but a general intolerance of newcomers. The head of my Afro-Caribbean section said to me: “I can hear it in my own community. They are making comments about the new communities that were being made about us.”‘
Again, she can understand the frustrations, on all sides.
‘There is a particular house that one of our senior officers knew used to be occupied by a family of four. Now there are 17 people living there, with seven cars between them. It is noisy and cramped.
‘Some of those living there decamp outside, and you get antisocial behaviour, drunkenness. There is resentment and tensions simmer. It’s our job to be aware of all that.’
What about her, though? When she stands in Sainsbury’s of an afternoon, realising that she is barely hearing an English voice, does she feel uneasy?
‘No, I don’t. Because I’ve become used to hearing lots of different nationalities through my work, I’m quite comfortable with it and, in some ways, it’s very exciting to have all these professional challenges.
‘My latest police community support officer is a Mandarin Chinese speaker because that is a whole untapped community that we didn’t really know or understand.’
Does that mean there is a problem with crime in the Chinese community?
‘Actually, it is as much about them being abused or exploited. The whole point is to get into these communities and understand what is going on in them, to make sure that you spot potential trouble before it flares up.’
An expensive business, then, this modern policing. And how ironic that so many people are going to so much trouble to understand each other, yet those who speak with the same native tongue are failing to communicate.
There has been a noticeable lack of one-to-one debate between Mrs Spence and Mrs Follett.
‘I actually asked to see her to talk through some of the issues that have been identified,’ says Mrs Spence, pointedly. ‘But she hasn’t quite got round to seeing me yet.’
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 11:15 pm on 26th May 2008
Richard Sonnenfeldt, Chief interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials
From persecuted to prosecutor
“By the time I saw Dachau I had no illusions,” said 83-year-old Richard Sonnenfeldt, a German Jew who, after fleeing his native country, surveyed the destruction the Nazis left in their wake and helped prosecute them as chief interpreter at the Nuremberg Trials. As a fourth grader in the small German town of Gardelegen – which, in the 1930s, had a population of 9,000 of whom 27 were Jewish – Sonnenfeldt was taught to march as a soldier with a stick on his shoulder. Gradually, Adolf Hitler’s name began to echo louder and louder throughout the country.
“Long before Hitler demanded total obedience,” Sonnenfeldt wrote in his book “Witness to Nuremberg,” “Germans were loath to stand up against anyone in authority…”
Before long, the young Sonnenfeldt was made to leave the classroom while his teacher led students in the Nazi salute. “The Germans enabled Hitler to do all he did but they didn’t know what the hell they were enabling him for,” Sonnenfeldt said at his home in Port Washington, New York. The Germans drove Sonnenfeldt’s parents to consider a family suicide when the Roosevelt administration suspended all immigration of German Jews and the two saw their means of survival dwindling.
“My mother sat me down and asked me how I’d feel about a family suicide,” Sonnenfeldt recalled, his lips forming a tiny smile of disbelief. “I was 14 years old and I said ‘no.’ And what I don’t know, of course, is what would’ve happened if I’d said ‘yes.’” Before Kristallnacht in November of 1938, Sonnenfeldt and his younger brother Helmut left Germany for England after their mother miraculously obtained boarding school scholarships for them. A year and a half later, however, Sonnenfeldt was rounded up along with other males with German passports over the age of 16 and sent to an internment camp, presumably, Sonnenfeldt explained, to protect England from Nazi sympathizers.
Soon, Sonnenfeldt was on a ship to Australia with other internees, separated from Nazi prisoners by a wall of barbed wire and rocked by repeated torpedo fire. Upon learning that Sonnenfeldt was Jewish, flabbergasted Australian guards transferred him to a small town where he became the “gun boy” for a commandant, accompanying him on trips to hunt wallabies.
Sonnenfeldt’s new role was short lived, however, and the 17-year-old was soon aboard another ship, this time to Bombay, India. Circuitously, Sonnenfeldt made his way to the U.S.
“By now I had twitted Nazis, who were as scared as I was of dying in a floating coffin; I had coped with British captors; and I had run a small factory in Bombay where, as a white man, I had been respected though perhaps not loved,” Sonnenfeldt wrote of his maturity through such a unique trajectory.
Drafted into the U.S. army, Sonnenfeldt rode reconnaissance during the conquest of Germany before being plucked from his platoon for his proficiency in English and German; a 22-year-old Jew from small-town Prussia had suddenly become American General “Wild Bill” Donovan’s interpreter. Having survived torpedo-infested seas, a wave of euphoria overcame Sonnenfeldt, who suddenly believed he “would live to do important things.” Now was his chance; but the experiences to come were sobering. “To walk into a place like Dachau and to see 100 bodies piled up and to see people who were too weak to survive after they were liberated…” Sonnenfeldt said softly as he recalled witnessing first-hand the devastation Hitler’s henchman had caused. “In Dachau if I had seen any of the guards I would have gladly shot them, but they were gone,” Sonnenfeldt said, explaining that thousands of those liberated from concentration camps still perished, despite the best medical attention.
“They couldn’t be saved. They were too far gone,” he said.
The images of such weak, tortured human beings stuck with Sonnenfeldt throughout his time at Nuremberg, where he spent countless hours interviewing and interrogating Hermann G�ring and the other major Nazi defendants. “Had I not escaped in time I would’ve been one of his victims,” Sonnenfeldt said matter-of-factly, wondering aloud if he would have fallen under Hitler’s spell had the German dictator not been an anti-Semite.
Source: http://www.queenscourier.com
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 8:11 pm on 21st May 2008
Entrevista al director de la RAE
«Vamos a un empobrecimiento del lenguaje por falta de lectura»
-¿Es cierto que la RAE estudia una tabla de abreviaturas para los sms?
-No. Ha sido un malentendido. Las abreviaturas en los sms están muy de moda. Acaba de celebrarse en San Millán de la Cogolla una reunión sobre el lenguaje de los jóvenes. La abreviatura es un fenómeno que nació con la escritura. Los primeros escritos, en piedra o en tablillas, ofrecían un soporte pequeño. El escritor que quería comunicar algo -por ejemplo, las cabras que tenía un pastor-, pretendía poner la mayor cantidad de datos con el menor número de signos. Los primeros escribas utilizaron las abreviaturas por esta razón. La escritura de los móviles es un caso más de esa funcionalidad de la abreviatura. ¿Eso genera un problema?. Todo depende de la formación lingüística del que envía el sms. El problema se plantea si esa forma de escribir abreviada se traslada a la escritura normalizada y con incorrecciones ortográficas.
-¿Cuántas barbaridades lee a diario?
-Por gusto, lo que leo son cosas que están bien escritas. Leo novelas, poesía, ensayo… A veces se tropieza uno con barbaridades en los anuncios; no en la prensa, donde hay mucha gente que escribe muy bien.
-¿En España se habla peor que se escribe o viceversa?
-Quien bien habla, normalmente, está más cerca de escribir bien. Debo precisar que he oído hablar un español precioso a indios del altiplano -un español del siglo XVI-, y es posible que fueran analfabetos.
-¿Qué opina de que este año hayan ingresado en la RAE dos leoneses?
-Me he alegrado mucho. Han ingresado no por ser leoneses, sino por que son un gran filólogo (Salvador Gutiérrez) y un gran escritor (José María Merino).
-¿No cree que otros leoneses como Gamoneda, Crémer, Pereira, Colinas o Julio Llamazares deberían estar también en la RAE?
-¿Quiere que le de la larga lista de personas que me gustaría que estuvieran en la RAE? Son decenas. Sin embargo, la Academia es una corporación de sólo 46 personas. En cada momento la Academia elige dentro de esa gran lista al que más necesita, que puede ser un filólogo o un novelista o uno del cine; y, a veces, coincide que dos son de León…
-¿Realmente los ciudadanos son los dueños del lenguaje?
-Los hablantes son los dueños del lenguaje. Eso lo enunció Horacio y también Quintiliano. El árbitro de la lengua es el uso. El uso es el que hace que una palabra arraigue entre los hablantes, que una palabra deje de utilizarse o que vuelva a emplearse o que cambie de matiz… Pero todas ellas quedan en el diccionario, que es el gran granero.
-¿Y cuando la que arraiga es una palabra incorrecta?
-Sí, a veces arraigan palabras que no son acordes con la fonética española o que están mal construidas…
-¿Vamos hacia un empobrecimiento del lenguaje por culpa del dominio del inglés en Internet?
-Vamos a un empobrecimiento del lenguaje por falta de lectura. Hoy llegan palabras anglosajonas como antes llegaban galicismos o italianismos. Es problema está en la formación.
-¿Así hablas, así eres?
-Es hombre es un animal que habla; por tanto, el que no habla tiene recortada su humanidad. Y quien la enriquece es más capaz de ser persona. Las palabras pueden dar vida y matar, como decía Salinas. Depende de quién lleve el farol. Las palabras tienen una fuerza impresionante. Tres palabras, libertad, igualdad y fraternidad, sonaron a fines del XVIII y revolucionaron el mundo… La palabra puede perfeccionar como hombre y como ciudadano, porque quien tiene un dominio lingüístico no es fácil que le engañen con palabras.
-¿De qué va a hablar hoy en León?
-Como es la clausura del ciclo Académicos de la Lengua en León , voy a hablar de la Academia, de qué estamos haciendo y adónde vamos. Decía un académico mexicano que «la Real Academia se ha hecho una academia real»…
-¿La RAE sigue siendo una gran desconocida?
-Cada vez menos, pero sigue siendo muy desconocida. Por eso hoy quiero hablar en León de la esencia de la RAE y del trabajo que hacemos. Hoy llevo aquí desde las diez de la mañana, saldré a las diez de la noche, y no es un día excepcional.
-¿La RAE es sensible a las palabras propias del leonés?
-Yo estoy casado con una leonesa. En Carrizo he trabajado mucho y tengo una plaza con mi nombre, lo cual me hizo muchísima ilusión. Soy leonés de pro. En el diccionario tenemos muchas palabras leonesas. Sucede que ahora hay que reordenar el Diccionario Histórico de la Lengua Española. En el diccionario de uso hay 90.000 entradas, así que los términos históricos deben estar en el Diccionario Histórico. Y queremos que sea un diccionario universal, que acoja palabras de una y otra región, de España y de Latinoamérica.
-¿Una lengua como el leonés, que no tiene futuro, hay que dejarla morir?
-En el mundo puede haber 6.000 lenguas y la Unesco dice que a cada momento desaparecen algunas. Viajo mucho a América y allí sí que hay problemas con las lenguas minoritarias. Guatemala, por ejemplo, tiene 23 lenguas, 21 de ellas de la familia maya, y no se entienden entre sí. La academia maya está haciendo un esfuerzo por normalizarlo, pero los hablantes se resisten. En América hay centenares de lenguas que han desaparecido. No obstante, la Constitución española defiende el patrimonio lingüístico, porque es una riqueza más. El problema es cómo hacerlo: ¿construir una neolengua? En cuanto al leonés, está en la base del español y en el español de América, donde emigraron muchos leoneses. Lugar: Sala Región del Insituto Leonés de Cultura. Calle Santa Nonia, 3. Hora: 20.00.
Fuente: http://www.diariodeleon.es
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 5:15 pm on 21st May 2008
Entretien avec Régis Boyer, traducteur des «Sagas islandaises»
«Il n’y a pas de textes suédois légers»
Devant l’ampleur prise par le débat sur la traduction de la trilogie policière «Millénium», BibliObs continue l’enquête. Entretien avec Régis Boyer, spécialiste des langues scandinaves et traducteur pour la Pléiade des «Sagas islandaises»
BibliObs. – Tout d’abord, avez-vous lu «Millénium»?
Régis Boyer. – J’ai lu «Millénium» en suédois. Je trouve d’ailleurs que c’est un bon roman, pas uniquement un roman policier, et que Stieg Larsson est écrivain de haut vol. Il n’en reste pas moins que le succès planétaire de cet auteur suédois est étonnant; en France l’engouement durera-t-il? On sait que les Français sont un peuple volage…
BibliObs. – Avez-vous lu la traduction de Marc de Gouvenain et de Lena Grumbach?
R. Boyer. – Je n’ai pas la traduction, mais je connais les deux traducteurs – Marc de Gouvenain est un de mes anciens étudiants – et je pense qu’ils ont tenté de rester aussi fidèles que possible au texte. C’est ce que j’essaie moi-même quand je traduis. Cette fidélité au texte est souvent remise en cause par les correcteurs et relecteurs des maisons d’édition. Je me bats sans cesse contre la tendance rive gauche à la réécriture.
BibliObs. – Quels sont les problèmes spécifiques posés par les langues scandinaves?
R. Boyer. – Premièrement, ce ne sont pas des langues très difficiles – sauf l’islandais qu’il faut mettre à part. Ensuite, il y a beaucoup de répétitions dans les textes, alors qu’en français on bannit les répétitions. Le texte de Larsson est «lourd», mais il n’y a pas de textes légers en suédois et c’est là que réside la difficulté de la traduction en français. Les prosateurs suédois sont des esprits lents, lourds, manquant de subtilité; leur style colle à la réalité. Quant à celui des Norvégiens!… Ce n’est pas une critique, mais une constatation. Même la conversation n’est pas une chose facile en Scandinavie: les gens sont sur la réserve, ils communiquent difficilement. On est loin là-bas de l’art de la conversation et de l’écriture à la française.
BibliObs. – Jacques Drillon relevait des fautes de syntaxe, des pléonasmes…
R. Boyer. – Comme je l’ai dit, je n’ai pas lu la traduction: on peut toujours laisser passer des incorrections, même si l’on est agrégé de lettres, ce que je suis et ce que Marc de Gouvenain n’est pas. Les auteurs de livres policiers scandinaves, comme par exemple Arnaldur Indridason, n’emploient pas une langue relâchée ou argotique. Ils ne tombent jamais dans la vulgarité systématique, ce qui est un travers des policiers français. Mais je ne suis qu’un spécialiste des «Sagas islandaises» du XIIe siècle…
BibliObs. – «Millénium» regorge de citations bibliques.
R. Boyer. – La Suède est un pays de Luthériens, pétris de citations bibliques. On connaît là-bas sa Bible par cœur et les références bibliques sont constantes, presque ataviques. On ne peut, par exemple, pas lire Kierkegaard si on ne connaît pas sa Bible sur le bout des doigts.
BibliObs. – Les traducteurs subissent-ils des pressions de la part des éditeurs et doivent-ils travailler trop vite?
R. Boyer. – Chacun a son rythme. Pour ma part, je traduis vite, au fil de la plume et je compte sur une relecture attentive de mon texte. Mais comme je l’ai déjà dit, je me méfie des correcteurs et relecteurs, titulaires d’une licence de lettres, et qui pensent qu’ils sont les seuls à maîtriser la langue française.
Source: http://bibliobs.nouvelobs.com
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 3:35 pm on 19th May 2008
Multilingüismo y primera lengua, La facultad humana del lenguaje se concreta en una diversidad de hablas que nos une porque nos enriquece
El 15 de mayo se presentó en Barcelona el libro, El plurilingüismo en España, obra colectiva que ha supuesto el estudio en profundidad de los aspectos sociolingüísticos y psicolingüísticos de 18 comunidades españolas (históricas y de nueva migración) y la participación de 22 estudiosos de diversas latitudes del Estado. Esta obra describe, por tanto, una realidad plurilingüe: la España plurilingüe. El lector se preguntará por qué el libro habla en el título de plurilingüismo y no de multilingüismo. La diferencia no es banal, tal como nos indican sendas entradas en los diccionarios. El prefijo pluri denota pluralidad, se refiere al conjunto de una realidad que es plural. Multi significa algo que está compuesto o tiene muchas partes y pone de relieve cada una de las partes que suman. De ahí que hayamos preferido reservar la palabra multilingüismo para la capacidad de un individuo de dominar dos, tres o más lenguas.
Para alcanzar ese reto, es decir, educar a nuestros niños para que puedan ser multilingües, se debe cumplir una condición sine qua non: que estos niños dominen su primera lengua (L1), porque de nada sirve contar con individuos multilingües si lo son con graves deficiencias de recepción y producción lingüística en su L1 y en las lenguas que han aprendido después.
EL LENGUAJE es una capacidad que nos hace humanos y nos distingue de otras especies, y el dominio de nuestra primera lengua es un derecho humano. Lo es por su propia naturaleza: porque es una capacidad innata; porque es el único sistema de comunicación que es articulado y que está asociado al pensamiento humano, y porque se aprende. Este lenguaje humano, que nos une a todos, se concreta en diferentes lenguas, y el respeto a esas diferencias lin- güísticas también nos debería unir, porque nos enriquece como seres humanos y constituye un ejemplo de un derecho a la diferencia que no discrimina al otro.
En este sentido, un Estado que se precie de serlo y tenga voluntad de serlo, en un territorio con una realidad plurinacional, plurilingüística y multicultural como es España, debería proteger los derechos lingüísticos de sus ciudadanos en su primera lengua (catalán, español, gallego y vasco) y debería asegurar que los niños de hasta 5-6 años puedan desarrollar sus capacidades cognitivas y de socialización, al tiempo que aprenden a leer y escribir en su primera lengua, porque esas habilidades, una vez adquiridas y reforzadas en una lengua, sirven para adquirirlas y aprenderlas en otra u otras lenguas.
Eso debería ser así también para los niños de otras comunidades hablantes de otras lenguas de España (asturiano, aranés, aragonés, lengua(s) de signos) y, por supuesto, también para los niños de las comunidades de reciente, y no tan reciente, migración; escolares todos ellos que deberían poder iniciar su andadura académica en su primera lengua (L1) o al menos recibir una instrucción en esa lengua con clases de refuerzo, sobre todo en las edades de pleno desarrollo cognitivo y de socialización.
POR TANTO, la primera misión de un Estado en materia de lengua es asegurar que todos sus ciudadanos dominen esa primera lengua, y en este momento eso quiere decir reforzar las habilidades lingüísticas orales y escritas, con cursos de expresión oral y escritura creativa, integrados en lo que se conoce como enseñanza por contenidos (content-based teaching), porque ese dominio de su L1 será el elemento que facilitará el futuro bilingüismo y multilingüismo.
Pero hay otros mecanismos facilitadores. El Estado –en el caso que nos ocupa, el español– también debería propiciar y planificar la enseñanza y el aprendizaje de todas las lenguas de España en todos los territorios: a) en las zonas bilin- gües, planificando e implementando los objetivos de dominio de dos lenguas al final de una etapa de escolarización, con fórmulas de inmersión lingüística, alternando la enseñanza de los contenidos unos cursos académicos en una lengua y otros, en otra; y b) en las zonas monolingües, aprovechando la riqueza lingüística de España para que sus ciudadanos, además del español, tengan a su disposición los medios y los recursos humanos y científicos necesarios para aprender las lenguas del entorno geográfico más próximo. Y, por supuesto, también introduciendo una lengua extranjera a la edad que los expertos ya saben que es la idónea para hacerlo. Hace ya unos cuantos años que quedaron demostradas científicamente las bondades del bilingüismo y del multilingüismo.
ASÍ PUES, sería deseable, también en materia de lengua, que nuestros políticos se dejaran asesorar por los especialistas en la materia (léase lingüistas y educadores), que son muchos y muy preparados. Eso es lo que sucede, por cierto, en otros países de base plurinacional, plurilingüística y multicultural, en los que, aplicando el sentido común y los últimos hallazgos científicos en materia de lengua, se ha llegado a fórmulas que permiten proteger y potenciar los derechos lingüísticos individuales y territoriales, y, por supuesto, potenciar el plurilingüismo de un país y el multilingüismo de sus ciudadanos.
Catedrática de Lingüística Inglesa de la Universitat Pompeu.
Fuente: http://www.elperiodico.com
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 11:07 am on 5th May 2008
ENTREVISTA CON MARIA TERESA CABRÉ, PRESIDENTA DEL CONGRESO INTERNACIONAL DE NEOLOGÍA EN LENGUAS ROMÁNICAS
NACIMIENTO L’ARGENTERA, 1947
ESTUDIOS LICENCIADA Y DOCTORA EN FILOSOFÍA Y LETRAS
TRAYECTORIA DIRECTORA DEL TERMCAT. PRESIDENTA DE LA RED IBEROAMERICANA DE TERMINOLOGÍA (RITERM). PRESIDENTA DEL INSTITUT UNIVERSITARI DE LINGÜÍSTICA APLICADA (UPF). MIEMBRO DEL IEC
Catedrática de Filología Catalana y profesora de Lingüística y Terminología de la Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Teresa Cabré formó parte de los introductores de la terminología moderna en Catalunya. Toda una fuerza de la naturaleza en cuanto a la promoción de iniciativas, está integrada en un gran número de instituciones y participa en múltiples proyectos tanto en el ámbito europeo y peninsular como en el iberoamericano. Es directora del Observatori de Neologia, presidenta de la Asociación Española de Terminología (Aeter) y secretaria general de la Red Panlatina de Terminología (Realiter).
–¿El catalán está dotado de los elementos necesarios en comparación con otras lenguas?
–Sí. Da grandes muestras de vitalidad interna. Sobre todo si se analiza a partir de la generación de neologismos nuevas palabras. Yo siempre comparo las lenguas con las personas. Si tienen una buena salud, evolucionan de modo natural y no necesitan grandes remedios para proporcionarles vitalidad y servir para la comunicación.
–¿Algún síntoma negativo-?
–El problema de la diferencia de grado entre el conocimiento de la lengua y el uso social de manera espontánea. La producción de neologismos es un termómetro muy importante de la fuerza de una lengua, que está muy sana si sus hablantes son capaces de crear nuevas palabras a partir de sus propios recursos. Preocupa, eso sí, la presencia preponderante de los castellanismos en la adopción de palabras. La vitalidad espontánea e inmediata debería fortalecerse al máximo para evitar los bueno, tío, algo, después, casi, que se repiten cada año como formas más repetidas y no admitidas.
–Este último aspecto va en contra de la corrección…
–Sobre todo de la fisonomía de la lengua. Deberíamos haber podido formar a nuestros jóvenes para que usaran un lenguaje, un argot, mucho más adecuado a lo que es la fisonomía del catalán. La única solución es que la gente joven adquiera los mecanismos de la propia lengua para generar su registro autónomo.
–El Primer Congreso Internacional de Neología en Lenguas Románicas (Cineo 2008) dio ayer el pistoletazo de salida en la sede del Institut d’Estudis Catalans.
–El congreso pretende despertar el interés por la neología como uno de los elementos más importantes de la evolución de las lenguas. La neología es un tema de interés tanto desde el punto de vista social como para la promoción y supervivencia de las lenguas. También nos gustaría asegurar la cooperación de las diversas lenguas románicas, consideradas en estos momentos como no dominantes. En tercer lugar desearíamos que se constituyera una asociación internacional que asegurara reuniones periódicas.
–Ha tenido un papel muy activo en la génesis de este congreso.
–Llevamos 20 años trabajando en neología, concretamente a través del Observatori de Neologia, que se creó en 1988 en la Universidad de Barcelona. Todo este trabajo ha cuajado en una constelación de redes de cooperación en el plano peninsular e internacional.
–¿Puede avanzar alguna de las conclusiones del encuentro?
–Si hay algún tipo de pacto o acuerdo de cooperación a nivel institucional sería un gran paso adelante. Las diferencias entre las lenguas de España, por ejemplo, se verían en parte superadas si pudieran cooperar en el tema de la neología, del análisis conjunto de por donde vamos unos y otros. Sería un gran acuerdo.
–¿Se trata de formar un frente ante el inglés…?
–De ninguna manera. El inglés es una lengua dominante que se ha convertido en una lengua internacional o lingua franca, pero esto no debe ir en detrimento de las lenguas propias. La política lingüística que llevamos a cabo en este congreso, y que se aplica en la red panlatina de terminología, es que cada uno habla en su lengua y los otros lo entienden. No hay interpretación. Se oye el castellano, el francés, el rumano, el portugués, el catalán, el italiano y el gallego.
–¿Se puede trasladar esta opción a la sociedad?
–Se trata de promover la idea de que, con respeto y confianza, la comprensión es posible en España. Muchas veces la incomprensión se basa en el miedo a no entender y a no ser entendido. Un señor castellanohablante puede comprender a un señor que se exprese en catalán en una situación de relajamiento y ganas de entender. El grado de intercomprensión de las lenguas románicas es muy elevado.
Fuente:http://www.elperiodico.com
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 10:07 am on 4th May 2008
Es más fácil y barato ser autónomo en Escocia
Ha creado una empresa de traducción por Internet, una de las metas que perseguía y que «si me hubiera quedado en el País Vasco, no habría conseguido
Isabel Hurtado de Mendoza no para ni un momento. Vive pluriempleada. Esta joven getxotarra afincada en Edimburgo desde hace ocho años trabaja a destajo. A más no poder. Pero la verdad es que todo ese esfuerzo invertido en hacerse un hueco en el complicado sector de la traducción ha merecido la pena. Y mucho. Después de unos comienzos «muy duros», ha montado su propia empresa, una compañía especializada en traducciones dentro del mundo del Arte que opera por Internet, sin olvidar que también es la directora del Departamento de Español de la Universidad de Edimburgo y que, esporádicamente, ocupa el puesto de traductora oficial del Ayuntamiento de Edimburgo y del Parlamento escocés. Tiene tiempo para todo.
Como muchos otros vascos en el extranjero, Isabel comenzó su aventura internacional de la mano de un curso Erasmus. En su caso, en Manchester. Durante ese año se dio cuenta de que la especialización en su área era la llave para prosperar en el negocio. Así que de Manchester saltó a Edimburgo. «Pensé en varias universidades, pero esta ciudad me gustó mucho. Además, los escoceses son más simpáticos y cordiales que los ingleses», revela. Y de ahí, directa al éxito.
La distancia pesa
Esta getxotarra está contenta con su vida -«disfruto a tope»-. La verdad es que no se puede quejar. «Si me hubiera quedado en el País Vasco, nunca habría conseguido las metas que me planteé hace años. Además, es más fácil y barato ser autónomo en Edimburgo porque te dan muchas ayudas y formación», admite.
Sin embargo, ni a las mejores historias les falta un ‘pero’. El suyo es tener que lidiar con la distancia que le separa de su tierra y de su gente, que en muchas ocasiones es una losa demasiado pesada para llevar a la espalda. Tanto es así, que necesita el contacto con los suyos. Constantemente. «Tengo la necesidad de volver a Bilbao cada tres meses. Además, como lingüista me viene muy bien no perder contacto con el castellano», argumenta.
Pero con todo, Isabel está adaptada, integrada por completo, a la nueva vida que ha construido en Escocia. Quienes lo llevan peor son sus familiares y especialmente sus padres. No es extrañar. «Al principio me apoyaron porque pensaron que iba a ser algo temporal, pero hace dos años me compré un piso y entonces se dieron cuenta de que me iba a quedar unos cuantos años más. La verdad es que lo llevan bastante mal», insiste. Pero de sus palabras se desprende que su intención es regresar. Le encantaría. Eso sí, aún no tiene definida la fecha, ya que todo depende de su situación laboral. Ha conseguido demasiado como para tirarlo por la borda antes de tiempo. «Volveré cuando en Bilbao vea que hay posibilidades en mi área de trabajo», aclara. Por eso, por el momento, va a haber que esperar. Un poquito.
Fuente: http://www.elcorreodigital.com
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 17:47 pm on 13th May 2008
Traducir es ser fiel a lo literario y no a lo literal
El traductor italiano de Javier Cercas, David Trueba, José Manuel Fajardo o Arturo Pérez-Reverte recibió ayer el Premio Internacional Claude Couffon
Natural del Piamonte italiano, criado en Génova y pasado por la Universidad de Bolonia en los años en que se burlaba del poder, hijo adoptivo (o algo así) de México, Pino Cacucci (1950) es autor de novelas, libros de viajes, biografías y textos teatrales; pero ayer el Salón del Libro Iberoamericano reconoció otra de sus facetas, otorgándole el Premio Internacional de Traducción Claude Couffon, no en vano ha vertido a la lengua de Bocaccio a varios de nuestros principales escritores, desde Arturo Pérez-Reverte a Javier Cercas, a los que se añaden también firmas sobresalientes de allende el Atlántico.
-Paco Ignacio Taibo II ha dicho de usted que es «el escritor más chilango del mundo». ¿Nos lo traduce?
-Chilangos son los que viven en Ciudad de México, Distrito Federal, dicho de manera amistosa y nada despectiva. Proviene del lenguaje nahuac. De modo que para mí la definición de Paco Ignacio Taibo es como un título honorario. He pasado gran parte de mi vida allá, desde los años 80. Y la proporción más abundante de lo que he escrito se refiere a México. Aunque ahora resido en Bolonia, continúo yendo un par de veces al año. Taibo me ha adjudicado más recientemente la condición de ‘villista’, pues he traducido su monumental biografía de Pancho Villa al italiano.
-El salto a México lo dio tras pasar por la Universidad de Bolonia en unos años muy movidos y creativos… ¿Cómo recuerda esa época?
-Fue en la mitad de los 70 y, en efecto, el movimiento universitario era muy creativo, se trataba de oponerse de manera imaginativa y no violenta a todos los signos del poder. Por desgracia, el terrorismo ocupó la pantalla y cuando se vuelve la vista atrás ocupa un espacio de muerte y sangre. Pero lo que de verdad predominaba era el espíritu comunitario, la ocupación de calles y plazas y la contestación a las distintas formas de represión, más allá de lo político. Después, nos volvimos a encerrar en las casas. Y yo comencé a viajar a París, a Barcelona, finalmente a México…- y a escribir, con la suerte de poder vivir de este oficio.
-¿Cómo ha sido el tránsito que llevó de aquellos aires de renovación a la presidencia de Berlusconi?
-No sé bien de qué manera explicarlo… No es una cuestión de izquierdas o derechas, sino un hecho cultural pésimo. Se puede hablar de una decadencia moral, o de que no es posible acceder al poder con las televisiones en contra. Por ejemplo, la criminalidad ha disminuido en los últimos tiempos; sin embargo, los canales televisivos muestran a todas horas violaciones, asesinatos…, y se crea una sensación de inseguridad.
-¿La visión que tenemos en Europa de México -corrupción y violencia- puede estar igualmente deformada?
-Es un estereotipo. ¿Hay menor corrupción en Italia? No sé. El escritor Antonio Sarabia realiza talleres literarios con policías, lo que demuestra que no todos se corresponden con la idea que se ha transmitido de ellos. México es un país enorme y complejo, en el que algunas cosas van mejorando. Se preocupan más por la contaminación que en las ciudades italianas, y la violencia -situándonos en el contexto- no es la de sus vecinos de más al Sur.
-Uno de sus libros es ‘San Isidro Fútbol’, en el que las líneas del campo futbolístico se trazan con un alijo de cocaína… ¿Qué importancia le concede al humor literario?
-Enorme. No lo uso tanto como quisiera. Cuando nos tomamos demasiado en serio, nos toman a broma los demás. Y en ‘San Isidro Fútbol’ aproveché, por otra parte, para desmitificar la religión futbolística y hablar de gentes que tildamos de analfabetas y poseen una sabiduría milenaria.
-En su tierra italiana hay un aforismo que dice que el traductor es un traidor…
-Ojalá que no… Es muy sutil esa frontera. Creo que se ha de ser fiel al autor que traduces, pero sin esclavitudes, teniendo pequeñas libertades. Es más relevante ‘lo literario’ que ‘lo literal’.
-¿Dialoga mucho con los escritores a los que traduce?
-Sí, he tenido la fortuna de no tropezarme con una especie de escritores a los que si les haces una consulta, piensan que dudas… La vida está llena de dudas… Por lo general, acabo siendo amigo de los escritores traducidos, Pérez-Reverte, Javier Cercas, José Manuel Fajardo, Manuel Rivas, Andreu Martín… Ahora estoy con la última novela de David Trueba, ‘Saber perder’.
-Una de sus biografías repara en la figura de Jim Morrison. ¿Qué le atrajo del músico?
-Pertenece al libro ‘Rebeldes’, en el que se incluyen asimismo Tupac Amaru, el anarquista español Fernando Sabaté… Más que su música, me interesó su vida y lo que significó para los jóvenes de su época, el ascendiente que tuvo sobre ellos y el coraje de sus palabras.
Fuente:http://www.elcomerciodigital.com
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 15:24 pm on 13th May 2008
El mundo necesita cierta dosis de idealismo quijotesco
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 11:35 am on 7th May 2008
Demand surges for translators at medical facilities
Once upon a time, when a patient walked into the San Francisco General Hospital emergency room speaking a language no one there knew, the staff headed for the Yellow Pages. “We used to call restaurants,” says Alan Gelb, chief of the hospital’s emergency department. “If we had an Ethiopian patient, we’d look in the Yellow Pages and find an Ethiopian restaurant and get them to interpret over the phone.”
Today, doctors at “the General” have access to interpreters who work in 31 languages, including nine Chinese dialects and five Filipino ones. And when a patient shows up speaking yet another language, they call a telephone language service that works 24 hours a day in 130 languages.
But while interpretation has gotten better, the need is growing even faster. By 2004, the number of U.S. residents who speak a language other than English at home grew to almost 50 million, 19% of U.S. residents. And there were 22 million residents that year with limited English proficiency.
Very few states even have interpreter-certification programs, says Maria Michalczyk, former co-chairwoman of the National Council on Interpreting in Health Care.
That’s resulting in higher costs and worse medical care, says Glenn Flores, a professor of pediatrics at the Medical College of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His analysis of language barriers to health care in the USA appears in today’s New England Journal of Medicine.
Making do with semi-fluent medical personnel can lead to trouble. Oncologist Arturo Molina remembers one incident from his tenure at City of Hope cancer center near Los Angeles.
A frantic colleague called Molina, who is fluent in Spanish and English, to ask him to talk to a patient who was about to have a bone-marrow transplant. The procedure makes the patient sterile, so the doctor had tried to explain that she could freeze the patient’s semen to preserve his fertility after the cancer was cured.
But the physician’s Spanish was limited. “What (the patient) heard was that they were going to freeze his testicles,” says Molina, who calmed the patient down.
Having family members translate can be problematic. In California, Assemblyman Leland Yee has proposed a bill to prohibit children under 15 from being required to translate for their parents
Yee, who grew up in San Francisco’s Chinatown, was called upon to translate for his mother at the doctor’s office when he was 6 years old. “You were never sure as to what you were translating was accurate. And the doctor never knew. And my mother never knew, so it was all up to me,” he says.
“It’s probably one of the worst situations you can put a child in and one of the worst situations you can create clinically in terms of getting good treatment,” Flores says. Children don’t understand the terminology and don’t want to admit when they’re scared or don’t understand the question, he says.
Spanish speakers make up about two-thirds of the U.S. residents who speak another language at home, Flores says. But less common languages can pop up as international crises bring in new refugee groups or as older populations shift.
In Washington, Oregon, California and Minnesota, large Hmong communities exist. The Hmong are a hill tribe from Laos who came to the USA after the Vietnam War ended.
In San Francisco, Geld says he has seen an influx of Mongolian speakers. Berkeley, Calif., has a big Tibetan community.
Michigan has a growing group of Somali refugees, who speak Bantu and Maay. Lexington, Ky., has a small Arabic community, and in Oregon, a colony of Old Believer Russians numbering in the thousands speak an archaic Russian dialect, Michalczyk says.
But the need for translators is hitting hardest in communities that have up until now been entirely English-speaking. “A lot of rural communities have never seen that kind of diversity. Tennessee and North Carolina — they’re seeing really high growth rates of Latino populations. That really brings the issue to the fore,” Flores says.
Federal rules require that any medical provider receiving Medicaid or Medicare offer interpreters. But in general, the rules have not been enforced, Flores says. Forty-three states have one or more laws about language access in health care, up from 40 in 2003, according to a survey by the National Health Law Program. But while some laws are detailed, others say only that access is important.
Some have suggested that people who come to the USA to live should simply learn English, says Wilma Alvarado-Little, co-chairwoman of the National Council on Interpreting in Health Care.
But foreign-born patients who otherwise do fine speaking English may need help in an emergency room because they’re too worried and lack the vocabulary, she says.
Source: http://www.usatoday.com
________________________________________________________________________________________________
The latest generation
Surge in immigrant births is reshaping Massachusetts in ways that are both subtle and profound
At 11:57 a.m. on Wednesday, Fares Ibrahim breezed into the world at Cambridge Hospital, a bundle of curvy eyelashes and downy black hair. His arrival added yet another member to one of the fastest-growing demographics in the state: He is the child of an immigrant mother.Of all the births in Massachusetts, the percentage of babies born to immigrant mothers has nearly doubled since 1989. Back then, 14 percent of all births were to foreign-born women; by 2006, the percentage had surged to 27 percent, according to the most recent figures from the state Department of Public Health. It is a remarkable figure, which one scholar said the state hasn’t seen since the immigrant wave of the early 20th century. And the rise in immigrant births is reshaping the state in ways that are both subtle and profound.
In maternity wards, nurses increasingly chant “push” in Spanish, Portuguese, and Urdu; in schools, translators show bewildered parents how to scrutinize report cards; and in some neighborhoods, more children are debating whether they are African-American, Haitian-American, or black. “That’s a major demographic and social development for the Commonwealth,” said Andrew Sum, director of the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. “It’s extraordinary . . . You’d have to go back to the 1910s to find anything like that.”
Advocates say the increase is replenishing the state’s population at a time when it is losing people to other states. But others say the shift could strain state and local services by intensifying demands for translators, healthcare, and other programs designed to help immigrant parents from Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America assimilate. Among the newest arrivals are the children of legal and illegal immigrants – the public health department doesn’t distinguish the two – though studies show the great majority of immigrant families are legally here. “I think we would be surprised as to the burden on the state,” said Steve Kropper, co-chair of Massachusetts Citizens for Immigration Reform, which favors stricter controls on immigration. The state, Kropper added, should study the financial burden the new families place on public schools, healthcare, subsidized housing, and the environment. “Let’s find out what the cost is to Massachusetts.”
Nationally, the percentage of births to immigrant mothers rose from 14 percent in 1995 to 21 percent in 2004, according to the most recent figures available from the US Census. In Massachusetts, the percentage of children born to immigrant mothers varied sharply by race and ethnicity, accounting for 12 percent of all white infants, 88 percent of Asian babies, and almost half of Hispanic and black babies. Various factors are fueling the surge: Immigration has increased in Massachusetts – about 14 percent of all residents are now foreign-born – and immigrant women tend to have higher fertility rates. That, coupled with a below-average birth rate and the exodus of many young American-born families to more affordable states, contributed to the rise in both numbers and percentages.
In total, 20,929 of the 77,670 births in Massachusetts in 2006 were to foreign-born mothers. That compares with 12,756 of the 91,314 births in 1989, according to the state. The shift has happened gradually, Sum said. Some cities and towns have been dealing with it for years; others are addressing more abrupt changes in population and expanding services to keep up. The first signs of the shift are in hospitals, specifically in the maternity wards where the immigrants’ babies are born. There, doctors and nurses increasingly confront a staggering array of languages, traditions, and beliefs.Devout Muslim women fast during Ramadan, waiting until sundown to eat, alarming their doctors. Some Somali women accustomed to giving birth at home are reluctant to go to the hospital at all.
Even food can be an issue. In many cultures, women traditionally eat soup – vegetable or codfish in Haiti, corn in Brazil – after giving birth, believing it helps them recover. Hospitals have had to adapt, letting families bring in homemade foods if they wish. Tufts Medical Center in Chinatown in recent years created regular clinics specifically to expand services to pregnant Asian women. Doctors speak Mandarin, Cantonese, and Vietnamese.Cambridge Health Alliance, which includes Cambridge Hospital, has been dealing with higher numbers of immigrants for years, but recently, demand is increasing. A “doula” program launched in 1996 pairs women to guide expectant immigrant mothers through their pregnancies. The number of doula-assisted births has soared from 30 that first year to more than 700 in 2007.
“The need has been very great,” said Sarah Oo, who oversees several Massachusetts General Hospital programs to help pregnant immigrant women and new mothers in Chelsea. “There’s a huge need to make healthcare culturally appropriate. It’s a challenge for everyone.”Beyond the adjustments in the maternity wards is a struggle to integrate immigrant families into mainstream America – and some controversy over their contributions.Many critics raise concerns over the cost to taxpayers. Others say the growth of immigrant families bolsters an otherwise stagnant state workforce and often stabilizes neighborhoods as the parents find jobs and buy homes. “This state really needs the population. It needs younger people, working-age families,” said Shuya Ohno, spokesman for the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition.
The immigrant experience – and the impact on society – varies widely, as a walk through the labor and delivery room at Cambridge Hospital last week showed. Baby Fares is the son of middle-class, college-educated Egyptian parents. His mother, Iman Selim, and father, Tarek Ibrahim, a Northeastern University physics teacher, speak impeccable English. Fares’s older brother and sister are in school.
Down the hall, a woman from Brazil, watching over her baby, Alex, has more worries because she is here illegally. The infant’s older sister is with relatives in Brazil. The new mother does not speak English and, like her husband, works menial jobs. The surge in the number of immigrant children is posing a major challenge to public schools, forcing them to find new ways to educate students and their families. Increasingly, children arrive unable to speak English, and parents are ill equipped to help them at home. Boston school officials recently recruited teachers in Puerto Rico because they speak Spanish and English. Hispanics are now nearly 37 percent of the student body, just behind black students at 39 percent.
In Randolph, school enrollment has flipped from 56 percent white a decade ago to 52 percent black, 24 percent white, and 15 percent Asian this year. This spring, the schools started offering live translations in Spanish, Haitian Creole, Vietnamese, and Chinese to attract parents to meetings about education, said Superintendent Richard Silverman. Chelsea schools tapped Ali Abdullahi, a refugee from Somalia who speaks five languages, to teach immigrants from his homeland, as well as Iraq and other countries, to buy T passes, ride the bus, and visit schools.
“They are scared,” said Abdullahi, whose position is paid for by Mass. General’s program in Chelsea and the schools. “They need a little push. That’s where I come in. I give them a little jolt to make them braver.” Though Hispanic and Asian families are known as the fastest-growing groups of immigrants, in Massachusetts a high percentage of black children also have immigrant mothers – and that is leading to differences in how children define themselves.The state Department of Education calls black students “African-Americans,” but increasingly children of immigrants from Haiti and other countries are rejecting that term.
Unlike most African-Americans, who are descended from slaves and fought for freedom, Haitian-Americans often speak another language and trace their roots to a Caribbean nation with a rich but troubled history. In another example, Andrea Cabral was widely hailed as the first black sheriff of Suffolk County when she was elected in 2004. She is half Cape Verdean, and a strong contingent of Cape Verdeans have claimed her as a role model. “We need to recognize that the black community is much more diverse now than it ever has been,” said Regine Jackson, an assistant professor of American studies at Emory University in Atlanta who is from Boston and studies race and ethnic issues here. “It’s not always clear who you’re talking to. Sometimes people will say I’m not African-American at all. I’m Jamaican. I’m Nigerian.”
Source: http://www.boston.com
Last updated at 14:45 am on 21st April 2008
Learning Swedish: lessons in language and life
The fact that most Swedes speak English with near-native fluency is both a blessing and a curse. It’s great if you’re a first-time visitor to Stockholm and can stop almost anyone between the ages of nine and 99 to ask for directions to the Old Town. But trying to learn Swedish is difficult because you can always revert to English. I arrived in Sweden in August 2002 armed with Prisma’s Abridged English-Swedish and Swedish-English Dictionary and an eight-week intensive Swedish course from the University of California at Berkeley behind me. Four years later, the dog eared dictionary has grammar notes scribbled in the margins and I have become a fluent Swedish speaker, more or less.
Swedish Word of the Day
The process of learning Swedish was not entirely painless. I once asked my hairdresser if she had time to put “flingor” in my hair. Turns out, the word I really wanted was “slingor,” for “highlights.” Instead, I had asked her to put breakfast cereal in my hair. A big part of the reason I speak Swedish as well as I do now is that I quickly met Swedish friends who were willing to help me practice. One of our techniques was keeping track of our “Swedish Word of the Day” on a list tacked to the kitchen cupboard.
I came across the list a few months ago while sorting through some old papers. It was fun not only to see how far my Swedish has progressed, but it also provided a record of the conversations we had around the dinner table in our shared apartment. The list helped me learn practical vocabulary, including portkod (door code), osthyvel (cheese slicer) and benvärmare (legwarmers).
An insider’s perspective
In Sweden it’s rare to be in a situation where you are forced to speak Swedish to be understood.
“Of non-native speakers, Swedes have one of the highest levels of fluency in English, particularly in conversation,” says Bryan Mosey, a British colleague of mine in Stockholm. “It’s what I as a linguist would define as a second rather than a foreign language.”
Despite Swedes’ fluency in English, learning Swedish was one of my goals from the moment I stepped off the plane at Arlanda Airport. Speaking the language of my host country has been the difference between being a perpetual outsider and feeling at home. It’s not just being able to order a cup of coffee without the cashier automatically switching to English when she hears an American accent. It also means that my environment becomes comprehensible.
Language learning as cultural insight
“There’s a process of automation in language learning,” Mosey says. “When we start learning a new language, we have to actively think about what we are saying. Gradually, we achieve a level of fluency that requires less effort – perhaps this enhances the perception of being ‘more at home’.
“I know that a lot of English speakers live here a long time without learning Swedish, and you can certainly do that. But learning the language allows one to experience the culture from within.”
Speaking Swedish has unlocked several personal and professional doors for me. On a personal level, learning a foreign language (and blunders one makes while doing so) is something to which many people can relate. The topic has more than once served as an ice breaker when meeting new people – Swedes and other foreigners alike. The anecdotes are endless…and often priceless. A Swedish flatmate once said to me and my English friend that his brother in Lappland makes “blankets.” We both imagined his brother making handcrafted quilts. The guy then explained that his brother worked for an IT company, not for a linen manufacturer and that was how we discovered that the Swedish word for “application” is “blankett.” His brother makes online questionnaires.
Learning the language has also been a good career move. I have worked on projects translating text from Swedish to English, and as a freelance writer, speaking Swedish has allowed me to communicate with interviewees on their own terms. But there’s still a way to go. I think it’s physically impossible for my lips to form the right shape to correctly pronounce the Swedish word for seven: sju. It sounds almost like “shoe,” but not quite. I’ll let you know when I get it right.
of which 8.5 million live in Sweden.
native language (around 6% of the population).
universities in 43 countries around the world.
Swedish at the university level outside of Sweden.
(SFI). According to Statistics Sweden, almost
49,000 students were enrolled in SFI in 2004-05.
Swedish as a second language are also available. In
2004-05, 35,660 students participated in such
courses.
sometimes required when applying for university
studies in Sweden.
year of primary school (around age nine).
Television, broadcasted in 2003 a total of 9,828 hours
of programs, of which 5,331 hours were subtitled.
Source: http://www.sweden.se
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 14:45 am on 21st April 2008
Leterme: “El conocimiento insuficiente de una lengua en Bélgica es fuente de injusticias sociales”
Yves Leterme acaba de ser nombrado primer ministro de Bélgica tras unas largas y complicadas negociaciones políticas, marcadas por las diferencias entre las comunidades flamenca y valona. Bélgica ha permanecido casi un año sin gobierno. La situación es, muy delicada. La coalición gubernamental tratará, por tanto, de encontrar soluciones a problemas como el separatismo, la autonomía y los equilibrios entre las regiones ricas y pobres del país. EuroNews: Señor primer ministro, gracias por concedernos esta entrevista y bienvenido a EuroNews. Bélgica es tradicionalmente un país proeuropeo. Algunos de sus predecesores se han definido como federalistas europeos ¿es usted también federalista? ¿Cree que es algo que existe todavía?
Yves Leterme, Primer Ministro belga: Lo soy, en efecto. Durante mis estudios universitarios recibí clases de federalismo europeo. He trabajado en las instituciones europeas y soy un europeo convencido. Es más, yo creo que, en la actualidad, es difícil ser belga y no estar convencido del valor añadido de la Unión Europea.
EuroNews: ¿Se puede ser federalista en Europa y confederalista al mismo tiempo?
Yves Leterme, Primer Ministero belga: Sí, eso debe ser posible. Las instituciones evolucionan y yo soy el primer ministro de un gobierno que tiene un programa de reformas institucionales, también de reformas del Estado y este programa gubernamental encaja muy bien en la evolución europea.
EuroNews: Pero usted llega de una fase bastante complicada, debido precisamente al equilibrio interno del Estado, con una fuerte polémica entre el enfoque federal y el confederal. Así que, ahora, debería encontrar un equilibrio entre las dos posiciones ¿le parecen conciliables?
Yves Leterme, Primer Ministro belga: Digamos que el atractivo de Béligica, aunque a veces también su dificultad en el día a día, es estar en la frontera no sólo lingüística sino también de las grandes culturas europeas. Esto hace que el modelo belga sea muy atractivo, aunque a veces sea difícil lograr acuerdos. Es cierto que, durante los últimos meses, para llegar a un buen equilibrio, un nuevo equilibrio de nuestras instituciones, un mejor reparto de las competencias y de las responsabilidades hubo que negociar para encontrar posibilidades de acuerdo, de procedimiento. De momento, hay un gobierno que tiene una mayoría bastante cómoda y que ha presentado al Senado una proposición de ley especial que busca reequilibrar las instituciones y transferir competencias a las regiones y comunidades. El objetivo es alcanzar, para el próximo verano, un segundo acuerdo, por un lado, sobre las garantías en cuanto al funcionamiento del Estado federal y, por el otro, sobre las transferencias complementarias de competencias.
EuroNews: Como por ejemplo, ¿regionalizar el empleo? ¿Piensa usted que la parte valona de Bélgica podría estar interesada en una transferencia así?
Yves Leterme, Primer Ministro belga: Creo que los que miran la situación con cierta objetividad deben constatar, en primer lugar, la existencia del drama social de la alta tasa de desempleo, particularmente en algunas zonas de Valonia, aunque no se debe generalizar. Por otro lado, se encuentra Bruselas, otro drama. Pese a que la capital es el motor económico de nuestro país, no llega a ofrecer suficientes oportunidades, posibilidades a los demandantes de empleo en su propio territorio. Por eso, creo que debemos intentar encontrar en los próximos meses los medios que permitan a las regiones, a las diferentes partes de Bélgica, tener un mercado adaptado a las necesidades. Los problemas, en la mayoría de los territorios de Valonia, no son los mismos que los que encontramos en Flandes, por poner un ejemplo. La tasa de desempleo en Flandes es un tercio o la mitad que la de Valonia.
EuroNews: Los socios más duros de la coalición que fueron también los más duros en las negociaciones para formar gobierno, como ciertos partidos francófonos ¿están de acuerdo con este enfoque?
Yves Leterme, Primer Ministro belga:En todo caso, en el acuerdo gubernamental y también en la exposición de motivos de la proposición de ley que fue expuesta en el Senado, y que está rubricada no sólo por los partidos de la mayoría sino también por una gran parte de la oposición, se afirma que queremos reformas a nivel del funcionamiento del mercado de trabajo y de las responsabilidades de los diversos gobiernos de Bélgica en lo concerniente a las políticas de empleo.
EuroNews: La Comisión Europea nove con buenos ojos el código flamenco sobre viviendas sociales ¿Qué opina de la postura europea?
Yves Leterme, Primer Ministro belga: Bueno, yo fui una de las personas que decidieron el código “wooncode” y por tanto lo defiendo. Su objetivo es intentar utilizar la solicitud de una casa protegida por parte de los individuos o de las familias, una casa sujeta a condiciones sociales, como método de integración. Y la integración pasa, entre otras cosas, por la disposición para aprender un idioma y creo que más allá de los tratados, acuerdos, reglamentos, etc. Es importante que a la gente se le ofrezca la posibilidad de integrarse, de sentir -digamos- la acogida en una comunidad y esto requiere dominar o, al menos, estar dispuesto a aprender un idioma.
EuroNews: ¿No le parece que hay cierta discriminación en este punto de vista?
Yves Leterme, Primer Ministro belga: No soy yo el que debe juzgar.
EuroNews: Tal vez para Naciones Unidas. Naciones Unidas tiene también una posición al respecto.
Yves Leterme, Primer Ministro belga: Si, pero ¿cuál es su pregunta?
EuroNews: Justamente, ¿cree usted que hay una forma de discriminación por razones lingüísticas?
Yves Leterme, Primer Ministro belga: Señor, yo he participado en la toma de decisión de este código, y creo que el objetivo está muy claro: es utilizar la demanda que pueden tener las personas para acceder a una vivienda social, como método de integración. Noto además que numerosos especialistas francófonos también en este país han dicho que, en efecto, la integración de estas personas, por ejemplo, los inmigrantes pasa por el conocimiento de la lengua local. Creo que, por ejemplo, los juristas que trabajan en esta materia deberían saber que más allá de sus reflexiones, muy interesantes a nivel jurídico, existe un drama social. Como sabe, el conocimiento insuficiente de una lengua en Bélgica, por ejemplo del francés o el flamenco, es fuente de injusticias sociales: hay niños que empiezan el colegio sin conocer ninguno de estos idiomas. Y más allá de Naciones Unidas o de la Unión Europea y de los informes que han sido publicados en esta materia, hay que intentar, sobre todo, resolver esta cuestión social. Creo que ofrecer tanto a los menores como a sus familias, demandantes de viviendas sociales, la posibilidad de integrarse a través de la lengua, es realmente ofrecerles un medio de emancipación social.
Fuente: http://www.euronews.net
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 08:20 am on 21st April 2008
El curso de la CGT contra la violencia de género abordó ayer la discriminación lingüística
La tercera sesión del curso tendrá lugar en el aula doce de la facultad el próximo lunes con José María Gualdo, de Hombres por la Igualdad, quien hablará de lo que pueden hacer los hombres en la lucha contra el machismo y la violencia de género.
Fuente: http://www.diariodelaltoaragon.es
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 08:10 am on 21st April 2008
¿Está perseguido el castellano?
El fomento del catalán, el euskera y el gallego ha originado movimientos en defensa de la lengua común, aunque el verdadero debate está en los derechos individuales
El concepto de “política lingüística” es inaudito en el resto de España, donde sólo hay una lengua oficial. Pero estas comunidades siguen avanzando en la promoción de su lengua tradicional con el objetivo de llegar a equipararla en importancia con la lengua común. Por primera vez, desde hace pocos meses, hay quien levanta la voz asegurando que se está produciendo una progresiva falta de espacio del castellano, e incluso se habla de persecución.
Son movimientos pequeños, muy recientes en Euskadi y Galicia y más consolidados en Cataluña, articulados políticamente sobre todo por el PP. Pero hace un año que en Galicia surgió un movimiento asociativo que asegura ver sus derechos amenazados como castellanohablantes. En enero, también un grupo de padres de alumnos comenzó una protesta similar en Euskadi, donde antes no generaba tensión la política lingüística. En los tres casos, la clave está en la educación. En Cataluña y Galicia no existe la posibilidad de estudiar sólo en castellano. En Euskadi sí, pero es una opción minoritaria, y el Gobierno vasco proyecta hacerla desaparecer por completo en dos años.
Aunque el castellano está muy lejos de ser un idioma amenazado en estas comunidades, el tema toca uno de los pilares de la vida de las personas, la educación de los hijos y su futuro. Un ámbito en el que cualquier preocupación es legítima, más allá de ideologías.
Los afectados castellanohablantes esgrimen la Constitución y los derechos humanos para reclamar como un derecho escolarizar a sus hijos en su lengua materna. La Constitución dice que “el castellano es la lengua española oficial del Estado. Todos los españoles tienen el deber de conocerla y el derecho a usarla”. Utilizarlo es un derecho constitucional, y conocerlo, un deber. Pero también dice la Constitución que “las demás lenguas españolas serán también oficiales en las respectivas comunidades autónomas de acuerdo con sus estatutos”. Es decir, todo lo concerniente a esas lenguas se regula en los estatutos y depende de las comunidades. Además, las protege: “La riqueza de las distintas modalidades lingüísticas de España es un patrimonio cultural que será objeto de especial respeto y protección”.
Por su parte, el artículo 26 de la Declaración Universal de los Derechos Humanos de 1948 dice: “Los padres tendrán derecho preferente a escoger el tipo de educación que habrá de darse a sus hijos”. La Declaración no hace ninguna referencia a la lengua materna, aunque sí rechaza en otro artículo la discriminación por razón de idioma. La Constitución cita a la Declaración como referencia cuando haya que interpretarla.
La clave que justifica las políticas lingüísticas es una convicción: la potencia del castellano es tal que las lenguas cooficiales son incapaces de competir con él. Y no se resignan ante el darwinismo lingüístico. Esta idea la resumió excelentemente el líder de Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya, Josep Lluís Carod Rovira, durante el debate del Estatuto catalán en el Senado, en mayo de 2006. El PP se quejaba de la agresión al castellano que suponía el nuevo texto. Así respondió, en catalán, Carod Rovira: “El castellano es una lengua hablada por 400 millones de personas que dentro de poco serían muchas más. ¿Alguien puede sostener de verdad que el futuro de la lengua española depende de Cataluña? ¿De verdad? Quien haya entrado en cualquier establecimiento de Cataluña habrá visto que se usan normalmente las lenguas más diversas, y que el catalán no está entre ellas. ¿No tenemos derecho como ciudadanos a reclamar la presencia normal de nuestra lengua? […] ¿Es normal que, fuera del ámbito catalán, haya sólo nueve universidades españolas en las que se enseña catalán? Eso frente a las 14 de Italia, 16 de Francia, 21 de Gran Bretaña y 29 de Alemania”.
Hay que concederle a Carod Rovira que el futuro del castellano como idioma mundial no está amenazado por su partido, ni por la Generalitat catalana. En comparación, el catalán o el euskera tienen muchas más papeletas de ser barridos por la globalización.
Pero hay que distinguir dos niveles en esta polémica, y analizarlos por separado. Como explica el académico de la RAE José Antonio Pascual, “un asunto son los derechos individuales de las personas y otro es el peligro para el castellano”. Pascual considera, por un lado, que “el castellano no está amenazado”. Y por otro, que “el que no puede escolarizar a su hijo en castellano tiene derecho a quejarse. La discriminación positiva de una lengua no justificaría actuar contra otra, como supondría que no se pudiera enseñar”.
Se queja, además, de que la politización de este asunto, “que no es ni blanco ni negro”, haga parecer que todo el mundo está situado en algún bando. “Soy un defensor absoluto del bilingüismo. Y no estoy de acuerdo con amigos catalanes que lo fueron también, pero que ahora propugnan el monolingüismo con el fin de salvar al catalán: el fin no justifica los medios”.
¿Hasta qué punto está ocurriendo esto en Cataluña, Euskadi y Galicia? En Euskadi, desde enero un grupo de padres, bajo la denominación de Plataforma por la Libertad de Elección Lingüística, protestan porque creen que se margina el uso del castellano y se priva a sus hijos del derecho a escolarizarse en esa lengua.
En Euskadi la educación se divide en tres modelos: el A, en castellano, el B, bilingüe, y el D, en euskera (no hay C porque esta letra no existe en vasco). Apenas un 5% de los padres han pedido el modelo A para sus hijos en primaria este año. La educación en castellano ha ido reduciendo su implantación, según el Gobierno vasco, por falta de demanda. Según los padres de la Plataforma, estos centros se han ido convirtiendo en guetos de inmigrantes por falta de apoyo e inversión.
Lo que ha hecho el Gobierno vasco, que no tiene poder en el Parlamento para reformar la ley de educación, es fijar como objetivo mínimo un nivel muy alto de euskera. Así, “obligan a los centros a conseguir un nivel tan alto de euskera que la única forma de lograrlo es la inmersión total [todas las asignaturas impartidas en idioma vasco]“, dice Susana Marqués, miembro de la asociación. Marqués opina que el origen de esta política está en que “en todos estos años no han conseguido el bilingüismo”. Después de más de 20 años educando en euskera, este idioma no está en la calle. Ni siquiera todos los que han estudiado íntegramente en euskera toda su vida lo dominan. No tienen oportunidad de usarlo. El 70% de los comercios de Euskadi no utiliza jamás el vasco.
Patxi Baztarrika es el viceconsejero de Política Lingüística del Gobierno vasco. Su objetivo es “articular un Euskadi realmente bilingüe”. “No se trata de sustituir ninguna lengua. Sólo conseguir una mayor igualdad social de las dos lenguas y una mayor igualdad de oportunidad de uso de las dos”, afirma. Es claro cuando dice que “en Euskadi, no aprender euskera no es una opción”. “Los que estudian íntegramente en euskera no tienen ningún problema con el castellano. Si salieran del sistema sin hablar castellano bien, yo sería partidario de que se corrigiera”, añade Baztarrika.
El castellano “está presente y debe estar presente”, continúa. “Pero su fuerza es tal, afortunadamente para él, que plantearse cualquier peligro de debilitamiento por culpa del euskera es ridículo, si se me permite. El castellano es una lengua de Euskadi, pero sería absurdo que nuestro objetivo fuera asegurar la conservación del castellano”. Aunque no es de la supervivencia del castellano de lo que se quejan estos padres.
En Galicia, la Xunta publicó el año pasado un decreto que desarrolla la antigua Ley de Normalización Lingüística. Al menos el 50% de las asignaturas deberán ser impartidas en gallego. Entre ellas, las más importantes. En castellano se pueden dar gimnasia, música, tecnología y plástica, aquéllas en las que apenas hay que leer y escribir. El modelo de política lingüística se pactó con el PP en la Xunta, pero ha sido ahora, con el BNG al frente, cuando se ha aplicado en su integridad.
“Vamos a la catalanización”, clama Gloria Lago, profesora de inglés y fundadora de la asociación Galicia Bilingüe, surgida a raíz del nuevo decreto, porque considera que margina el castellano. Lago asegura que la situación de las aulas gallegas “es una ficción”. “Los profesores fingen durante la clase. Los niños les piden que hablen en castellano y no pueden, porque lo prohíbe la ley. Luego suena el timbre y todos vuelven a hablar su idioma”.
La responsable de Política Lingüística en Galicia es Marisol López. Reconoce que en Galicia no hay forma de escolarizarse en castellano, “pero tampoco en gallego”. “El plan de estudios es el de una sociedad con dos lenguas. Queremos conseguir el dominio de las dos”, continúa. “El castellanohablante, si no se discrimina positivamente el gallego, puede acabar no dominándolo”. Y con ello “no se le hurta el derecho a conocer y usar el castellano” reconocido en la Constitución, dice. “Hace poco”, argumenta, “se inauguró un colegio trilingüe, con un 95% de horas en inglés y unas pocas en castellano y gallego. ¿Ocurrirá que no aprendan bien estos idiomas? No, porque tienen otros ámbitos donde hablarlos”.
Por último, en Cataluña la voz institucional en defensa del castellano la han puesto el Partido Popular y Ciutadans (cuarta y quinta fuerza, respectivamente, en el Parlament). El propio Mariano Rajoy hizo de ello un tema de campaña, y trató de acorralar a Zapatero en un debate televisado para que avalara la política lingüística de la Generalitat. “El 50% de la población de Cataluña es de origen castellanohablante, y es imposible estudiar en castellano, ni en los privados ni en los concertados”, dice Carina Mejías, portavoz del PP en el Parlamento catalán. “Como todos ven la tele en castellano, se da por supuesto que se sabe castellano”.
“El derecho a usar el castellano está en el artículo 3 de la Constitución, y ese derecho es aplicable a la educación”. Para el PP, en las sociedades bilingües “no hay conflicto si no hay alguien que induce a él. En la calle se habla castellano y catalán con toda naturalidad. Los conflictos los inducen estas actuaciones sectarias”.
Desde la Generalitat, el responsable de Política Lingüística, Bernat Joan, opina que esta protesta “sólo estaría legitimada si los alumnos en Cataluña no tuvieran una formación adecuada en castellano. Ése no es el caso”. El modelo catalán se basa en un principio: “Si vivimos juntos, nos educamos juntos. Tener colegios diferenciados por razón de lengua es muy peligroso”. Con esta política, “un entorno completamente catalanizado no es previsible. Creo que en el contexto social hay suficiente castellano como para que se pueda aprender bien”.
La respuesta de algunos lingüistas es que la enseñanza del castellano no se puede dejar en manos de la televisión. Por ejemplo, el académico de la RAE Gregorio Salvador considera un “derecho” estudiar en la lengua materna. Y no cree que valga con conocer el idioma por el entorno. “Una cosa es conocerlo y otra es recibir todos los conocimientos en esa lengua. La lengua vehicular debe ser la misma en la que el niño crece, la lengua familiar. Hay niños que van a conocer un castellano hablado, vulgar, para el uso cotidiano. Pero el conocimiento de la lengua materna debe ser un conocimiento pleno en todos los órdenes de la vida”. Con estas políticas no se perjudica al idioma, dice Salvador, “sino a las personas, que se ven privadas de la segunda lengua del mundo”.
¿Hasta qué punto estas políticas están afectando al conocimiento del castellano? Como sus homólogos de Galicia y Euskadi, Bernat Joan no tiene problema en asumir que “si de repente hay un bajón en rendimiento en castellano, habría que corregir esta política”. A este respecto, poco trascendieron fuera de Cataluña unas declaraciones del conseller de Educación, Ernest Maragall, en las que reconocía que los niños de una escuela que acababa de visitar en Olot (en el interior de Girona) tenían “dificultades” para expresarse en castellano.
Pero hay pocos datos para estudiar el fenómeno. En cuanto a Galicia y Euskadi, puede servir el famoso informe PISA, sobre la calidad de la educación en la OCDE. Los alumnos de estas comunidades hicieron la prueba de nivel mayoritariamente en castellano, y las notas en comprensión lectora superan con creces la media española. La enseñanza en estos idiomas tampoco parece influir en el rendimiento en matemáticas, donde las tres comunidades también superan la media de España. En Cataluña, la prueba PISA se hizo en catalán, pero sirva como indicador que las notas medias en selectividad son muy parecidas en las asignaturas de lengua catalana y lengua castellana.
La situación parece estar equilibrada en este momento histórico entre el castellano y las otras tres lenguas de España. Pero, ¿hasta dónde se pretende llegar? Imaginemos, por ejemplo, una Cataluña monolingüe en catalán. Bernat Joan responde rápidamente: “Sería horrible. Significaría que nos hemos aislado, que censuramos prensa y televisión en castellano. Eso es algo que los catalanohablantes hemos padecido, pero no lo hemos aplicado”.
Fuente: http://www.elpais.com
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 20:40 pm on 18th April 2008
Ni vascos y vascas, ni diputados y diputadas
Crecen las alternativas para evitar el masculino a pesar de la Academia – El nuevo Congreso se enfrenta a una moción para cambiar su nombre
¿Tienen sexo las palabras o, simplemente, género? ¿El hecho de que un término sea masculino o femenino depende de su evolución dentro de una cultura en la que, hasta hace poco, las mujeres eran invisibles o, por el contrario, depende de una serie de reglas gramaticales ajenas a toda ideología? ¿Se refiere también a las vascas el plural “vascos” o es necesario citar ambas formas como hace, incansable, el lehendakari Ibarretxe? ¿Están incluidas las diputadas en el nombre actual del Congreso de los Diputados? La gramática dice que sí, pero los lingüistas no acaban de ponerse de acuerdo. Y la polémica sobre el posible sexismo del lenguaje arrecia. ¿Una nueva batalla contra la discriminación o el enésimo artificio políticamente correcto?
En diciembre de 1978 murió Golda Meir y a más de uno le escandalizó que se hablara de ella como ex primera ministra israelí. Y eso a pesar de que la Real Academia Española había aceptado ya el femenino de ministro. Por no hablar de que, en 1925, Rafael Alberti había llamado a la luna “presidenta de la noche”. Con el acceso de las mujeres a profesiones tradicionalmente ejercidas por los hombres han llegado las dudas sobre si la corrección política puede convivir con la gramatical. Es decir, si, en el camino de arquitectas, juezas y abogadas, Angela Merkel será algún día cancillera alemana o Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, portavoza del PP.
El nombre de las profesiones es uno de los mayores campos de batalla contra el posible sexismo. El otro, y tal vez el más ruidoso, es el desdoblamiento de masculino y femenino -el compañeros y compañeras de Llamazares o el citado vascos y vascas de Ibarretxe-, llamativo por su uso fundamentalmente público y porque rompe una de las reglas más simples del lenguaje, clásica y muy anterior al SMS, la economía: decir todo lo posible con el menor número de palabras posible. Algo que, entre otras cosas y sexos aparte, hace que en ciertos contextos la palabra día incluya también a la noche.
La gramática española recuerda que en las lenguas románicas el masculino es el llamado género no marcado, es decir, que abarca a individuos de los dos sexos. Sirve para los seres humanos, claro, pero también para los animales. Cuando alguien dice que el oso es una especie en peligro de extinción incluye tanto a machos como a hembras. Para Ignacio Bosque, miembro de la RAE, el desdoblamiento es un artificio que distancia aún más el lenguaje de los políticos del lenguaje común. “Si uno habla del nivel de vida de los españoles, es absurdo añadir ‘de las españolas’. Suena incluso ridículo”, apunta. “Si yo le pregunto a alguien cómo están sus hijos se entiende que también le pregunto por sus hijas. No creo que sea discriminatorio”. Bosque es ponente de la comisión que trabaja en la nueva gramática, que estará lista en dos años. La anterior era de 1931 y el esbozo para la renovación, de 1973. El académico insiste en que lo que algunos consideran el “ladrillo simbólico” del patriarcado no responde más que a una simple regla gramatical. La misma que funciona cuando se coordinan un sustantivo masculino y uno femenino. En “Juan y María han ido juntos”, “juntos” es un masculino plural: “Así es el idioma, no hay otra forma de decirlo”. El lingüista sostiene que incluso los políticos son conscientes de que la doble forma es artificial: “Cuando no tienen delante un micrófono hablan como todo el mundo”. Incluso hablando en público los políticos se relajan. Al final del último Consejo de Ministros, la vicepresidenta del Gobierno aseguró, a vueltas con la sequía en Barcelona, que al final habría agua para todos “los barceloneses y las barcelonesas”. Acto seguido añadió que en el mismo caso estarían los valencianos, los murcianos y los andaluces. Esta vez, sólo en masculino plural. “Quienes proponen el desdoblamiento se dan cuenta de que no pueden mantenerlo a ultranza”, insiste Bosque.
Mercedes Bengoechea, decana de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Alcalá de Henares y estudiosa del sexismo en el lenguaje, está de acuerdo con su colega académico: usar el masculino y el femenino sistemáticamente es insostenible. Pero matiza: “Lo importante es que quede en la referencia personal, en los sustantivos”. Además, recuerda que el desdoblamiento no es un invento nuevo. Está en el Cantar de Mío Cid, en el Libro de buen amor y en el romancero: “Allí se habla de hombres y mujeres, moros y moras… Es un recurso de la oralidad, es cierto, pero ahí está. Se encuentra hasta después de Cervantes, pero cuando aparecen las academias se crea una norma androcéntrica”.
La Real Academia Española se fundó en 1713 y la primera mujer en ingresar en ella, la escritora Carmen Conde, lo hizo en 1978. De los 40 académicos actuales, sólo tres son mujeres. La novelista Ana María Matute, la científica Margarita Salas y la historiadora Carmen Iglesias. Con todo, Bengoechea no cree que el sexismo sea voluntario. Y ése es, en su opinión, el problema. “Ya sé que cuando alguien dice ‘telespectadores’ no tiene intención sexista”, dice. “Es una herencia cultural. Como los toros. También heredamos palabras. Yo misma dejé de usar ‘minusválido’ porque dos alumnos me dijeron que, como afectados, les sonaba fatal. Preferían ‘discapacitado’. Alguien tiene que abrirte los ojos”.
Una de las salidas a la polémica del desdoblamiento es el uso de sustantivos colectivos -decir magistratura o justicia en lugar de jueces y juezas- y nombrar las instituciones según la actividad y no según el sexo -Colegio de la abogacía en lugar de Colegio de abogados-. Ignacio Bosque, que recuerda que la nueva gramática limita el desdoblamiento a situaciones en las que su ausencia podría ser malinterpretada -como en el caso de “los españoles y las españolas pueden servir en el Ejército”-, recuerda también que el uso de sustantivos colectivos no siempre funciona. El alumnado es, sí, el conjunto de los alumnos, pero “el conjunto de los enfermos no es la enfermería, ni el conjunto de los médicos es la medicina, ni el conjunto de los periodistas es el periodismo”.
Con todo, el lenguaje político y legal ha sido el más vigilante ante el posible sexismo, aunque los legisladores siguen demorando la respuesta a la demanda de quienes piden que se reforme el artículo 14 de la Constitución, el que dice que todos los españoles son iguales ante la ley. ¿Están también las españolas en ese masculino plural? La gramática, ya vimos, dice que sí. Algunas teorías, que no. Entretanto, el Congreso corrigió en noviembre de 2006 los términos considerados sexistas en el nuevo estatuto andaluz. Se añadió “andaluzas” “pueblo andaluz” y “ciudadanía andaluza” donde sólo decía “andaluces”. También se añadieron “funcionarias” y “ciudadanas”. Todo ello haciendo caso omiso a un informe encargado a la RAE por el Parlamento sevillano.
En ocasiones, el colectivo es una solución fácil, como cuando la Ley de Soldados y Marineros se transformó en Ley de Tropa y Marinería. En otras, la manera de dar con una buena respuesta consiste en eliminar la pregunta. En noviembre de 2004 Convergència i Unió presentó una proposición no de ley para pedir que la futura reforma de la Constitución incluyera que el Congreso lo sea a secas y deje de ser sólo de los Diputados. “El plural masculino es gramaticalmente correcto, pero hace invisibles a las mujeres”, afirmó en el debate la convergente Mercé Pigem. Reelegida el pasado 9 de marzo para una Cámara en la que, pese a la Ley de Igualdad, en esta legislatura habrá una mujer menos que en la anterior, la parlamentaria recuerda que se trataba de que “el nombre del Congreso no deje fuera a casi la mitad [menos del 36% en realidad] de sus miembros”. Izquierda Unida llegó a plantear incluso que se denominara Congreso de los Diputados y de las Diputadas. Finalmente, la Comisión Mixta de los Derechos de la Mujer y la Igualdad de Oportunidades, formada por 38 mujeres y dos hombres, aprobó la propuesta catalana por unanimidad. La votación, con todo, no era vinculante y su puesta en práctica está supeditada a que la actualización de la Carta Magna vaya más allá de lo propuesto por el propio Gobierno, fundamentalmente reformar el Senado y terminar con la discriminación de la mujer en la sucesión real. “El PSOE se comprometió”, afirma Pigem, “pero hay que seguir vigilantes”. La legislatura que ahora comienza dirá. Aunque no parece claro que la Constitución vaya a tocarse demasiado, sigue en el aire una medida que a pioneras como Clara Campoamor o Victoria Kent, parlamentarias en los años treinta, les habría resultado de un futurismo intrépido, muy posible pero poco probable. Ellas se llamaban a sí mismas “diputado”.
Aun así, el interés de las Cortes está por eliminar en lo posible el lenguaje sexista, siguiendo una sensibilidad cada vez más extendida en la Administración. En 1999 el Ayuntamiento de Madrid decretó que cuando se mencionaran en sus documentos puestos ocupados por personas concretas, se utilizara “el género masculino o femenino que a la persona concreta corresponda”. También había decidido modificar sus formularios para evitar formas como “el titular”, “el firmante” o “el que suscribe”. También los diccionarios han cambiado. En las definiciones se tiende cada vez más a usar “persona que” en lugar del tradicional “el que”. “En el fondo, los académicos no están tan en desacuerdo”, apunta Mercedes Bengoechea, que recuerda que la publicidad ha empezado también a evitar fórmulas sexistas: “Nos hace visibles para que compremos más, pero es un síntoma”. La filóloga, que es una de las impulsoras de Nombra.en.red, una base de datos del Instituto de la Mujer con alternativas para evitar el sexismo, afirma que buena parte de nuestro sentido de la corrección tiene que ver con la costumbre: “Hace 14 años un novelista español dijo que jamás se extendería la forma ‘presidenta’. Y hoy la sociedad lo dice con naturalidad. Lo que suena raro es oír ‘la presidente’. Si desde que fue elegida se hubiera llamado ‘cancillera’ a Angela Merkel nos sonaría normal. Pero me temo que ya no se va a feminizar. Ya lo hemos oído mucho”.
Ignacio Bosque, sin embargo, recuerda que “canciller” es un nombre común (es decir, masculino y femenino a la vez) en cuanto al género, como otros terminados en -er (ujier, sumiller). Y no se desdobla: “Tiene que ver con paradigmas morfológicos. Estas cosas no son gratuitas. Cuando la Academia propone una solución es porque la ha pensado. Hay que fijarse en un paradigma completo. Existen razones puramente gramaticales para que las cosas sean así”.
También son comunes sustantivos acabados en -ista como “pianista” o “artista”. Otros, como “modista”, también lo son, aunque “modisto” esté cada vez más extendido. Siempre hay casos particulares. En España se dice “clienta”, algo que en América es muy raro. La nueva gramática, insisten los académicos, no impondrá una forma. Sólo explicará el uso que hacen los hablantes. Por ejemplo, que jueza está generalizado en Argentina, Costa Rica y Venezuela, pero no en México ni en España. Aunque, paradojas de la lentitud, tal vez lo esté cuando se publique la nueva norma. La política de la RAE es no imponer términos cuyo uso no se ha extendido. Es lo que sucede con “matrimonio”, todavía no recogido en el diccionario académico como “unión legal de dos personas del mismo o de distinto sexo”: “Si se reúne suficiente documentación de este uso nuevo, tendrá que estar”, afirma el profesor Bosque. “La Academia refleja el uso que los hablantes hacen del idioma, no el que los políticos dicen que debe hacerse. Y es evidente que en la lengua común el desdoblamiento, por ejemplo, no se usa porque no hace ninguna falta”.
Para quienes vigilan el supuesto sexismo lingüístico, las razones puramente gramaticales no son tan puras. Están, dicen, cargadas de ideología. Ésa es la base del problema y ahí la sintonía parece imposible. Todo el mundo está de acuerdo en que las lenguas no son el resultado de actos conscientes de los hablantes. Pero hay quien sostiene que esa inconsciencia está llena de prejuicios. Para aquéllos, las convenciones lingüísticas no son un reflejo directo de la sociedad. Para éstos, no hay otro más directo: “Se dice que la sintaxis son reglas inocentes y sin ideología porque se ha olvidado la sociedad y la historia que creaba esas reglas patriarcales”, recuerda Mercedes Bengoechea. “Quedan restos de su origen. Una lengua nativa norteamericana, por ejemplo, habla de ‘pájaros, fuego, mujeres y otros animales peligrosos’. Es curioso que entrasen en la misma categoría. El uso del masculino es una regla gramatical, sí, pero no ajena a la realidad. La lucha de los defensores de la neutralidad del lenguaje también es ideológica, como la nuestra, pero ellos no lo reconocen”.
Bosque, en efecto, no comparte las razones extralingüísticas. “Existe discriminación, pero no en el lenguaje, en la vida: laboral y social. Ésa es la verdadera discriminación de las mujeres. La lingüística es falsa”. Ambos filólogos coinciden, no obstante, en que los posibles cambios, sean los que sean, tendrán que venir de un uso mayoritario. “Yo evito el lenguaje sexista en lo posible, pero, como decana, por ejemplo, no impongo nada en los asuntos de mi facultad. Debe ser algo natural. También yo hace 20 años pensaba de otra manera”, dice Bengoechea. No valen las imposiciones. Las palabras serán de quien sea, rezaba la vieja sentencia africana, pero la canción es nuestra.
Fuente: http://www.elpais.com
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 16:58 pm on 18th April 2008
‘Si en Cataluña no hay rótulos en catalán, ¿dónde los va a haber?’
El catedrático Juan Carlos Moreno. (Foto: Domènec Umbert)
Dos hombres se enzarzan en una discusión. Cada uno de ellos empuña una letra, ñ por un lado y ç por otro. El nacionalismo lingüístico es el último libro del lingüista Juan Carlos Moreno, un ensayo en el que el autor ataca a aquellas lenguas que se consideran superiores y tratan de imponerse sobre el resto. Y aunque el objetivo no es una crítica directa al castellano, los recurrentes ejemplos de que se sirve le harán diana de más de una crítica. El lo sabe. «Mucha gente que se lea el libro se quedará muy disgustada porque pensarán que voy a decir lo que ellos creen que es nacionalismo, cuando es justamente al contrario», dice.
BARCELONA
Aviso para navegantes del autor: «Mi libro es un termómetro para saber si uno es nacionalista o no. Si a uno le gusta es que no es nacionalista, ahora como no le guste…es que es nacionalista».
Pregunta.-¿Qué entiende por nacionalismo lingüístico?
Respuesta.-Consiste en que una lengua está asociada a un centro de poder que puede ser de un país o de varios. En torno a eso, existe una ideología que defiende que la expansión de esas lenguas se justifica por la propia lengua y no por las circunstancias. Muchos lingüistas intentan justificar en motivos lingüísticos aspectos que no son lingüísticos, sino políticos o históricos.
P.-¿Por ejemplo?
R.-Que el español o el inglés tengan 300 millones de hablantes no es normal y no tiene nada que ver con la lengua. Hay gente que lo justifica diciendo que son lenguas mejores o más fácil de ser aprendidas esta es la ideología que he tratado de estudiar.
P.-¿Por eso en su libro habla más del nacionalismo lingüístico español que del catalán porque el primero tiene más poder?
R.-El objetivo no es el nacionalismo lingüístico español, sino los nacionalismos lingüísticos. Si el inglés es una lengua internacional no se debe a cuestiones de la lengua, sino que se debe a circunstancias históricas, políticas, que vienen del colonialismo
P.-¿Y el catalán?
R.-Según la definición que yo hago del nacionalismos lingüísticos, no existe ni el vasco, ni el catalán ni el gallego. A ningún catalán se le ocurriría pensar que su lengua se hablara en Málaga.Y sería extraño que el catalán fuera la lengua oficial en Castilla.Sin embargo que el castellano se considera lengua oficial en Cataluña se considera normal. Y no, es tan anómala una cosa como la otra. En la ideología nacionalista españolista, cuando hay un paso que pueda poner en duda que el castellano sea dominante, hay protestas.
P.-Muchos no están de acuerdo con esa afirmación.
R.-Las dos características que asocio al nacionalismo nos las cumple el catalán. En cambio, sí las vemos en el español, que considera que la lengua propia es mejor que las demás, superior a las otras. El segundo rasgo de los nacionalismos lingüísticos es que la lengua de la nación se considera tan buena que lo mejor para los demás es que la adopten y substituyan esa lengua por la suya.
P.-¿Ha recibido críticas? R.-Bueno, el libro acaba de salir, pero las recibiré.
P.-Ultimamente se ha suscitado mucha polémica en Cataluña respecto a la lengua.
R.-En realidad en Cataluña no, la polémica viene de fuera. Pero todo ciudadano catalán tiene que conocer el catalán porque es lengua oficial de Cataluña y la Generalitat no puede consentir que haya un ciudadano que no sepa catalán. Yo lo llevaría más lejos: Creo que cualquier ciudadano español debería tener conocimientos de catalán porque estamos en un estado plurinacional y plurilingüístico.Para ser funcionario del estado deberían exigirse las lenguas del Estado pero eso se interpreta por la ideología nacionalista española como discriminación, cuando ellos nunca consideran discriminación exigir el castellano.
P.-¿Qué le parece que en Cataluña se multe a empresarios por no rotular en catalán?
R.-Es una estupidez, una tontería Si en Cataluña no hay rótulos en catalán, ¿dónde los va a haber?
P.-Se ha criticado mucho la dificultad de escolarizar a los niños en castellano en Cataluña…
R.-Volvemos a lo mismo. Si uno se va a Alemania, ¿puede escolarizarse en árabe? No, tiene que escolarizarse en alemán y a todo el mundo le parece normal. Es de cajón. En Cataluña se debe estudiar en catalán porque es la lengua internacional de Cataluña, también lo es el castellano, pero es una lengua de segundo orden en ese sentido.
P.-¿Diría que en Cataluña hay un bilingüismo real?
R.-Sí, de hecho Cataluña es uno de los países más bilingües de Europa y quizás del mundo. En Cataluña hay gente que usa las dos lenguas indistintamente.
Fuente: http://www.elmundo.es
________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 11:58 am on 18th April 2008
Ranking of Top 20 Translation Companies
So which are the biggest language service companies? This time around we decided to list the top 20 translation and localization firms doing business in North America and Europe. Next, we introduce the top interpretation firms in the United States as we begin our coverage of the speech-to-speech market.
In 2007 North Atlantic Firms Dominate Language Services
Rank | Company | HQ Country | Revenue in US$M | Employees | Offices | Status |
1 | Lionbridge Technologies | US | 400.0 | 4000 | 50 | Public |
2 | L-3 | US | 372.3 | n/a | n/a | Public |
3 | SDL International | UK | 142.9 | 1500 | 50 | Public |
4 | TransPerfect/Translations | US | 74.0 | 385 | 30 | Private |
5 | RWS Group | UK | 66.4 | 332 | 8 | Public |
6 | SDI Media Group | US | 65.0 | 200 | 23 | Private |
7 | Xerox Global Services | UK | 60.0 | 200 | 4 | Public |
8 | Euroscript s.a.r.l. | LU | 59.2 | 580 | 10 | Private |
9 | STAR AG | CH | 52.0 | 790 | 35 | Private |
10 | CLS Communication | CH | 38.6 | 280 | 14 | Private |
11 | Logos Group | IT | 36.5 | 120 | 17 | Private |
12 | LCJ EEIG | DE/IT/BE/ES | 26.5 | 159 | 8 | Private |
13 | Moravia | CZ | 25.2 | 381 | 9 | Private |
14 | Merrill Brink International | US | 24.5 | 140 | 4 | Private |
15 | McNeil Multilingual | US | 24.3 | 200 | 5 | Private |
16 | Hewlett-Packard ACG | FR | 21.7 | 65 | 6 | Public |
17 | Thebigword | UK | 21.0 | 108 | 7 | Private |
18 | Welocalize | US | 20.5 | 104 | 5 | Private |
19 | Skrivanek | CZ | 18.5 | 350 | 50 | Private |
20 | VistaTEC | IE | 15.6 | 123 | 5 | Private |
Table 1: Top 20 American and European Language Service Providers for 2005 Source: Common Sense Advisory, Inc. |
LSPs in Other Regions Present Opportunity and Challenges
For nearly two decades Ireland was the Mecca of the localization industry, but both suppliers like Lionbridge and large buyers like Microsoft have been gradually transferring operations and staff out of Dublin to lower-wage production and project management centers around the world.
As the nexus of the language service industry shifts eastward and to the south, longtime players will find both new rivals and opportunities in other regions. Some North Atlantic firms will subcontract work to companies in those areas, others will compete head-to-head for business in local languages, and still others will acquire or merge with these up-and-coming firms. Within five years, we expect to see greater representation from these regions in our top 20 list.
- Japan . While Japan is not a low-wage country, it is on the doorstep of rapid market development in China and Korea. Japan-centric LSPs such as Honyaku Center, Intergroup, and Sunflare book revenue of more than US$20 million per year, but they do business only in Asia. Asia-focused TOIN appeared on our July 2005 list, and promises to reappear if it ever consummates its lengthy on-again, off-again flirtation with Amsterdam-based ISP.
- China . The PRC government supports its information technology industry with tax breaks, subsidized office parks, and other incentives. We expect the Chinese to get more involved in building an indigenous localization industry to support its export agenda and to create more information-age jobs. Last year the PRC’s State Commission for Administration of Standardization approved China’s first set of standards on the quality of translation, thus setting a precedent for state involvement in the language industry. Local players of note are E-C Translations, Beyondsoft, Boffin, and Transco.
- Central Europe. Non-Euro Zone nations such as the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia comprise what we call the “Carpathian Tigers.” Firms such as Argos in Poland, and Moravia Worldwide and Skrivanek in the Czech Republic, pioneered the language service industry by taking advantage of cheap labor and real estate – and growing their business along with the economies of the region. More recently, Western European LSPs like SDL, Jonckers, and WHP set up shop in Central and Eastern Europe.
- Argentina. LSPs in Argentina have long concentrated their sales efforts in international markets, offering high quality at competitive prices. However, they compete with translators from 19 other countries – including Spanish speakers in the U.S. – who command the same prices for an often inferior product. If the Argentines continue to promote “translated in Argentina,” they could become a more serious force in language services than they are in soccer. Nonetheless, we expect American and European firms to look south – Argentina, Brazil, and Chile – for new offshoring centers. These offshore partners will be closer to home, in roughly the same time zones, with familiar business practices, the rule of law, and compatible cultural attitudes.
- India. Infosys and Wipro could become the proverbial skunk at the garden party once they regularly include “localization into 10 languages” as ¶ 8.3.5.a in their development contracts. One of these companies could quickly gain a North Atlantic language market presence by buying up several US$5-10 million agencies. Meanwhile, some LSPs have told us that they have already encountered Indian firms bidding against them for language projects. Microsoft’s US$1.7 billion investment in the country will surely become a superconducting magnet for Indian entrepreneurs who will localize Windows into nine Indian languages today – and who knows what other South Asian languages tomorrow?
-
Russia . Sitting on the eastern border of the European Union and controlling a large quantity of the world’s petroleum reserves, Russia still remains Churchill’s “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” for many Americans and Europeans. Russian LSPs such as Logrus and Star Spb compete regularly for business in Europe and North America, the former with a sales office in Philadelphia to assuage the concerns of Cold Warriors in the United States. We expect greater participation of Russian LSPs in the European Union, with special emphasis on the bordering markets of Germany and Russia’s former Warsaw Pact allies.
The Size of the Language Services Market in 2006 and Beyond
Common Sense Advisory estimates that the market for outsourced language services was US$ 8.8 billion worldwide in 2005, growing at 7.5 percent per year to over US$9 billion this year (see Table 2). We based our calculations on the aggregate revenues of the several thousand companies active in the business, many freelancers, and an approximation of the revenue generated by international and ethnic marketing agencies, boutiques, system integrators, consultants, printers, and other service providers who facilitate translation and localization.
Region | % of Total Market | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 |
U.S. | 42% | 3,696 | 3,973 | 4,271 | 4,592 | 4,936 | 5,306 |
Europe | 41% | 3,608 | 3,879 | 4,169 | 4,482 | 4,818 | 5,180 |
Asia | 12% | 1,056 | 1,135 | 1,220 | 1,312 | 1,410 | 1,516 |
ROW | 5% | 440 | 473 | 508 | 547 | 588 | 632 |
Totals | N/A | 8,800 | 9,460 | 10,168 | 10,933 | 11,752 | 12,634 |
Table 2: Language Services Revenues, in U.S. Millions of Dollars Source: Common Sense Advisory, Inc. |
Others have calculated the size of this market, with their “guesstimates” for the outsourceable language services business ranging between US$2 billion and $29 billion. Our figures fall at the lower end of the scale, but not at the bottom. The low-end estimate of US$2 billion would not cover major commercial and governmental expenditures, while the $29 billion number suffers from a serious methodological flaw in double-, triple-, and even quadruple-counting revenue.
Source: http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 10:50 am on 16th April 2008
Gordon Brown is under growing pressure to grant sanctuary to 91 Iraqi interpreters facing death threats because of their work for UK forces in southern Iraq.
Insurgent death squads have murdered scores of local interpreters who they accuse of ‘collaborating’ with the British Army.
Many of the survivors are now begging for asylum for themselves and their families as UK forces prepare to quit Iraq.
An Iraqi interpreter works for the US Army in Al Anbar province, Iraq
But the 91 interpreters still employed by the Army in southern Iraq have been told they will not receive any special treatment, despite the terrible risks they have taken to help the coalition.Defence Secretary Des Browne has come under fire in the row over whether the Iraqis should be given asylum here.
The minister was accused of a “masterclass in obfuscation” after appearing to suggest in a radio interview that up to 20,000 Iraqis who have worked with British forces since 2003 in the country may seek refuge in Britain.Currently only about 600 Iraqis are employees of the British military or the embassy in Baghdad, according to one report.
Tom Porteous, London director of Human Rights Watch, welcomed a review announced by Gordon Brown into whether 91 interpreters employed by the British military should be granted asylum. However, he added: “We are not particularly encouraged by the interview yesterday by the Secretary of State [Mr Browne], which seemed to have been a masterclass in obfuscation. He mentioned this figure of 20,000 which has now been qualified down to 15,000.”He also rejected Mr Browne’s claim that the situation was complex.”The situation is actually rather simple. There is a massive refugee crisis in the region,” he said.
“The British Government has done very little to deal with it either in terms of helping frontline states to cope with the strain or in terms or resettling vulnerable groups, including those who have worked for the British government.”He also said that many of those who had worked for British forces would want to stay in Iraq or the region, rather than coming to the UK, and that some may have died. It has emerged that one Iraqi translator has already been given asylum here this year in a case that could have a significant bearing on how ministers deal with future applications.
An immigration tribunal in Birmingham granted asylum in April to a translator who travelled to the UK via Syria. The panel found that an individual who “has worked as a translator or in any other way such as to be regarded by insurgents as a collaborator with the multinational force and who has been targeted by a significant insurgent group is a person who at present faces a real risk of persecution”.
The Iraqi, who cannot be named and worked for the US military, fled Iraq in February 2005 and came to Britain three months later hidden on a ship. By ordering a review into asylum claims by interpreters the Prime Minister has signalled that the Government accepts these cases need to be properly looked into. However, ministers are wary of opening the flood gates to tens of thousands more asylum applications from Iraq. Downing Street is reported to have told one interpreter, who had worked for the British army for three years, that he could not expect special treatment when seeking refuge in Britain.
Military officers argue that the UK has a “moral responsibility” to help such individuals.Mr Browne has stressed the “duty of care” Britain owes towards people it employs.The British military is reported to be employing 500 Iraqis in southern Iraq and a further 100 mainly working for the British embassy in Baghdad.
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk
________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 03:35 pm on 15th April 2008
‘We owe a great debt to Iraqi interpreters seeking UK asylum’
Bureaucracies are not fitted with hearts.
Deep in the bowels of the Home Office sit banks of men and women shuffling immigration claims.
Iraqi interpreters want the right to live in Britain
Every day of the year, they tick boxes to admit to Britain hundreds of relatives of existing residents, most from Muslim countries, who neither speak our language nor share our values. These people want to come here simply because they want a stake in our wealth.
Yet when 91 Iraqis who have served as interpreters for British forces at risk of their lives apply for entry, the machine turns nasty. It rejects them flat. Letters from British officers in support of their claims are dismissed. Convincing evidence that their lives could be forfeit if they stay in Iraq when we go is cast aside. Grotesquely, the official refusal to accede to the interpreters’ request for admission is revealed on the same day as the British Government’s request to the U.S. for the release from Guantanamo Bay of five prisoners who are, by all accounts, people with nothing good to offer Britain.
At the very least, they are Islamic extremists.
We are reaching out to them because Guantanamo is a hate-symbol to the Left, while turning our backs on men who have served in our uniforms for our cause in Iraq. Each of the two stories leaves a nasty taste.Whitehall admits to this country each year several hundred thousand people with no plausible moral claim on Britain’s goodwill. Yet it now refuses pleas on behalf of people who speak English, who have served alongside British soldiers on the battlefield, and to whom it is plain that we owe a debt of honour.
It stinks, of course. Now that the story has made headlines, it seems likely that Gordon Brown will intervene to reverse the decision. While he is at it, the Prime Minister should also address himself to the cases of 44 Gurkha veterans, who are appealing against the verdict of immigration tribunals not to admit them to Britain. Since the handover of Hong Kong in 1997, all Gurkhas who complete four years’ service under the Crown have an automatic right to remain in Britain if they choose. But these 44 left the Army before 1997. Thus, they are ineligible.
Theirs are test cases. In all, some 2,000 Nepalese veterans could come here, if rights of residence are backdated. However critical many of us are about Britain’s open-door immigration policy, it seems obvious that men who have served this country in arms have a claim upon us which only a Whitehall skinflint could dispute. Corporal Gyanendra Rai, for instance, suffered terrible injuries at Bluff Cove in the 1982 Falklands conflict.
It is suggested that if his request is granted to enter Britain for specialised NHS treatment, he will stay here. Which of us would dare to suggest that, if he makes such a choice, he should be denied? It is almost fantastic that we have admitted to Britain – for instance – thousands of Somalis on the grounds that their safety is at risk in their own country. Yet we deny passage to men who have served, in many cases for many years, in one of the great regiments of the British Army.
It is easy to see why the Home Office is nervous of letting in the Gurkhas and the Iraqis. They are fearful of setting precedents. It has always seemed likely that when U.S. and British troops leave Iraq, there will be open civil war. A host of people will become desperate for refugee status. The first countries they will look to will be those which have led the allied coalition which precipitated the collapse of their society.
The Americans will bear the brunt, but we, too, will face a dilemma about admitting some Iraqis. More than 30 years ago, I stood in the compound of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon amid a great throng of terrified Vietnamese, desperate to escape the Communist host that was sweeping towards victory at the end of the long and terrible war. All those people knew that, having served the Americans, their lives were imperilled. The scenes that day have remained imprinted on the minds of every witness ever since. Hour after hour we waited for the helicopters, each carrying to safety a pitifully small cargo of fugitives. Eventually, of course, all the ’round-eyes’, the white people, were borne away to the great U.S. fleet offshore in the China Sea. But when the Americans finally abandoned the embassy, some hundreds of Vietnamese were left behind. Their subsequent fate was bleak: death for some; years in re- education camps for the rest. That spring of 1975, 125,000 Vietnamese fled their country, and most went to make new lives in America. In the years which followed, some two million more migrants joined them, risking everything aboard frail boats on which many drowned in their desperation to reach the West. Today, 1.5 million Vietnamese live in the U.S., many more in Canada, others in communities around the world.
I recall that story because I am sure that today the Vietnam memory creates nightmares along government corridors both in Washington and London. If there is anything like that kind of mass exodus when Western forces quit Iraq, the U.S. and British governments will face an acute moral dilemma about how to respond.
A British civil servant might ask: ‘Remember 1973, when we had to accept 23,000 Ugandan Asians expelled by Idi Amin? Don’t we have enough immigration problems born out of “obligations” to people from our own empire?’ Yes and no. Most of us believe that, half a century and more after we quit the empire, it is more than time to call a halt to immigration based on Britain’s supposed duty to former colonies.
But it is a different story when we consider the causes of people who have fought under the British flag, or served our armed forces in war. A cynic could suggest that the Gurkhas have always been mercenaries, who serve the British Army for the same reason many Nepalese battalions today fight in the Indian Army: as a living, a career, not because they care a fig for the Queen or for this country. I do not think that argument will do.
There was a case for disbanding the Gurkhas when we left Hong Kong, because they have always been most notable as jungle fighters, at the forefront of our Asian wars. Instead, however, we chose to maintain the Gurkha units, because the British Army is desperately short of infantry soldiers, and the British public loves them. When we made that decision, we established an obligation.
We have a debt to those Nepalese warriors, which must be paid. We cannot discard them merely because they have served their turn. As for Iraq, it would be na’ve not to acknowledge that if the 91 interpreters now in the headlines are admitted to this country, more cases are likely to come forward of local people who have served the British in Basra, and now seek sanctuary. Whatever our views about Britain’s immigration policy, and indeed about the disastrous folly of Blair’s Iraq war, we must surely display generosity.
Interpreters who have worked for years with British troops in the field are far more likely to become good citizens of this country than many of those who come here shamelessly for our money, and want no part of our culture or lives. If we cannot recognise where our national duty lies here, then we shall not deserve the help of local people on future battlefields to which our soldiers are committed, as they surely will be. These Iraqis and the Gurkhas must be made welcome, in the name of Britain’s honour.
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Last updated at 09:50 pm on 14th April 2008
Betrayed
The Iraqis who trusted America the most.
by George Packer
An Iraqi interpreter wears a mask to conceal his identity while he assists a soldier delivering an invitation to an Imam for a meeting with an American colonel. Photograph by James Nachtwey.
On a cold, wet night in January, I met two young Iraqi men in the lobby of the Palestine Hotel, in central Baghdad. A few Arabic television studios had rooms on the upper floors of the building, but the hotel was otherwise vacant. In the lobby, a bucket collected drips of rainwater; at the gift shop, which was closed, a shelf displayed film, batteries, and sheathed daggers covered in dust. A sign from another era read, “We have great pleasure in announcing the opening of the Internet café 24 hour a day. At the business center on the first floor. The management.” The management consisted of a desk clerk and a few men in black leather jackets slouched in armchairs and holding two-way radios.
The two Iraqis, Othman and Laith, had asked to meet me at the Palestine because it was the only place left in Baghdad where they were willing to be seen with an American. They lived in violent neighborhoods that were surrounded by militia checkpoints. Entering and leaving the Green Zone, the fortified heart of the American presence, had become too risky. But even the Palestine made them nervous. In October, 2005, a suicide bomber driving a cement mixer had triggered an explosion that nearly brought down the hotel’s eighteen-story tower. An American tank unit that was guarding the hotel eventually pulled out, leaving security in the hands of Iraqi civilians. It would now be relatively easy for insurgents to get inside. The one comforting thought for Othman and Laith was that, four years into the war, the Palestine was no longer worth attacking.
The Iraqis and I went up to a room on the eighth floor. Othman smoked by the window while Laith sat on one of the twin beds. (The names of most of the Iraqis in this story have been changed for their protection.) Othman was a heavyset doctor, twenty-nine years old, with a gentle voice and an unflappable ironic manner. Laith, an engineer with rimless eyeglasses, was younger and taller, and given to bursts of enthusiasm and displeasure. Othman was Sunni, Laith was Shiite.
It had taken Othman three days to get to the hotel from his house, in western Baghdad. On the way, he was trapped for two nights at his sister’s house, which was in an ethnically mixed neighborhood: gun battles had broken out between Sunni and Shiite militiamen. Othman watched the home of his sister’s neighbor, a Sunni, burn to the ground. Shiite militiamen scrawled the words “Leave or else” on the doors of Sunni houses. Othman was able to leave the house only because his sister’s husband—a Shiite, who was known to the local Shia militias—escorted him out. Othman took a taxi to the house of Laith’s grandfather; from there, he and Laith went to the Palestine, where they enjoyed their first hot water in several weeks.
They had a strong friendship, based on a shared desire. Before the war, they had both longed for the arrival of the Americans, expecting them to change their lives. They had told each other that they would try to work with the foreigners. Othman and Laith were both secular, and despised the extremist militias on each side of Iraq’s civil war, but the ethnic conflict had led them increasingly to quarrel, to the point that one of them—usually Laith—would refuse to speak to the other.
Laith began to describe these strains. “It started when the Americans came with Shia leaders and wanted to give the Shia leadership—”
“And kick out the Sunnis,” Othman interrupted. “You admit this? You were not admitting it before.”
“The Americans don’t want to kick out the Sunnis,” Laith said. “They want to give Shia the power because most Iraqis are Shia.”
“And you believe the Sunnis did not want to participate, right?” Othman said. “The Americans didn’t give them the chance to participate.” He turned to me: “You know I’m not just saying this because I’m a Sunni—”
Laith rolled his eyes. “Whatever.”
“But I think the Shia made the Sunnis feel that they’re against them.”
“This is not the point, who started it,” Laith said heatedly. “Everybody is getting killed, the Shia and the Sunnis.” He paused. “But if we think who started it, I think the Sunnis started it!”
“I think the Shia,” Othman repeated, with calm knowingness. He said to me, “When I feel that I’m pushing too much and he starts to become so angry, I pull the brake.”
Laith had a job with an American organization, affiliated with the National Endowment for Democracy, that encouraged private enterprise in developing countries. Othman had worked with a German group called Architects for People in Need, and then as a translator for foreign journalists. These were coveted jobs, but over time they had become so dangerous that Othman and Laith could talk candidly about their lives with no one except each other.
“I trust him,” Othman said of his friend. “We’ve shared our experiences with foreigners—the good and the bad. We don’t have a secret life when we are together. But when we go out we have to lie.”
Othman’s cell phone rang: a friend was calling from Jordan. “I had a vision that you’ll be killed by the end of the month,” he told Othman. “Get out now, please. You can stay here with me. We’ll live on pasta.” Othman said something reassuring and hung up, but his phone kept ringing, the friend calling back; his vision had made him hysterical.
A string of bad events had given Othman the sense that time was running out for him in Iraq. In November, members of the Mahdi Army—the Shia militia commanded by the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr—rounded up Othman’s older brother and several other Sunnis who worked in a shop in a mixed neighborhood. The Sunnis were taken to a local Shia mosque and shot. Othman’s brother was only grazed in the head, but a Shiite soldier noticed that he was still alive and shot him in the eye. Somehow, he survived this, too. Othman found his brother and took him to a hospital for surgery. The hospital—like the entire Iraqi health system—was under the Mahdi Army’s control, and Othman decided that his brother would be safer at their parents’ house. The brother was now blind, deranged, and vengeful, making life unbearable for Othman’s family. A few days later, Othman’s elderly maternal aunts, who were Shia and lived in a majority-Sunni area, were told by Sunni insurgents that they had three days to leave. Othman’s father, a retired Sunni officer, went to their neighborhood and convinced the insurgents that his wife’s sisters were, in fact, Sunnis. And then, one day in January, Othman’s two teen-age brothers, Muhammad and Salim, on whom he doted, failed to come home from school. Othman called the cell phone of Muhammad, who was fifteen. “Is this Muhammad?” he said.
A stranger’s voice answered: “No, I’m not Muhammad.”
“Where is Muhammad?”
“Muhammad is right here,” the stranger said. “I’m looking at him now. We have both of them.”
“Are you joking?”
“No, I’m not. Are you Sunni or Shia?”
Thinking of what had happened to his older brother, Othman lied: “We’re Shia.” The stranger told him to prove it. The boys had left their identity cards at home, for their own safety.
Othman’s mother took the phone, sobbing and begging the kidnapper not to hurt her boys. “We’re going to behead them,” the kidnapper told her. “Choose where you want us to throw the bodies. Or do you prefer us to cut them to pieces for you? We enjoy cutting young boys to pieces.” The man hung up.
After several more phone conversations, Othman realized his mistake: the kidnappers were Sunnis, with Al Qaeda. Shiites are not Muslims, the kidnappers told him—they deserve to be killed. Then they stopped answering the phone. Othman called a friend who belonged to a Sunni political party with ties to insurgents; over the course of the afternoon, the friend got the kidnappers back on the phone and convinced them that the boys were Sunnis. They were released with apologies, along with their money and their phones.
It was the worst day of Othman’s life. He said he would never forget the sound of the stranger’s voice.
Othman began a campaign of burning. He went into the yard or up on the roof of his parents’ house with a jerrican of kerosene and set fire to papers, identity badges, books in English, photographs—anything that might incriminate him as an Iraqi who worked with foreigners. If Othman had to flee Iraq, he wanted to leave nothing behind that might harm him or his family. He couldn’t bring himself to destroy a few items, though: his diaries, his weekly notes from the hospital where he had once worked. “I have this bad habit of keeping everything like memories,” he said.
Most of the people Othman and Laith knew had left Iraq. House by house, Baghdad was being abandoned. Othman was considering his options: move his parents from their house (in an insurgent stronghold) to his sister’s house (in the midst of civil war); move his parents and brothers to Syria (where there was no work) and live with his friend in Jordan (going crazy with boredom while watching his savings dwindle); go to London and ask for asylum (and probably be sent back); stay in Baghdad for six more months until he could begin a scholarship that he’d won, to study journalism in America (or get killed waiting). Beneath his calm good humor, Othman was paralyzed—he didn’t want to leave Baghdad and his family, but staying had become impossible. Every day, he changed his mind.
From the hotel window, Othman could see the palace domes of the Green Zone directly across the Tigris River. “It’s sad,” he told me. “With all the hopes that we had, and all the dreams, I was totally against the word ‘invasion.’ Wherever I go, I was defending the Americans and strongly saying, ‘America was here to make a change.’ Now I have my doubts.”
Laith was more blunt: “Sometimes, I feel like we’re standing in line for a ticket, waiting to die.”
By the time Othman and Laith finished talking, it was almost ten o’clock. We went downstairs and found the hotel restaurant empty, with no light or heat. A waiter in a white shirt and black vest emerged out of the darkness to take our orders. We shivered for an hour until the food came.
There was an old woman at the cash register, with long, dyed-blond hair, a shapeless gown, and a macramé beret that kept falling off her head. I recognized her: she had been the cashier in 2003, when I first came to the Palestine. Her name was Taja, and she had worked at the hotel for twenty-five years. She had the smile of a mad hag.
I asked if there had been any other customers tonight. “My dear, no one,” Taja said, in English. The sight of me seemed to jar loose a bundle of memories. Her brother had gone to New Orleans in 1948 and forgotten all about her. There was music here in the old days, she said, and she sang a few lines from the Spaniels’ “Goodnight, Sweetheart, Goodnight”:
Goodnight, sweetheart,
Well it’s time to go.
I hate to leave you, but I really must say,
Goodnight, sweetheart, goodnight.
When the Americans first came, Taja said, the hotel was full of customers, including marines. She took the exam to work as a translator three times, but kept failing, because the questions were so hard: “The spider is an insect or an animal?” “Water is a beverage or a food?” Who could answer such questions?
Taja smiled at us. “Now all finished,” she said.
MY TIME WILL COME
Millions of Iraqis, spanning the country’s religious and ethnic spectrum, welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But the mostly young men and women who embraced America’s project so enthusiastically that they were prepared to risk their lives for it may constitute Iraq’s smallest minority. I came across them in every city: the young man in Mosul who loved Metallica and signed up to be a translator at a U.S. Army base; the DVD salesman in Najaf whose plans to study medicine were crushed by Baath Party favoritism, and who offered his services to the first American Humvee that entered his city. They had learned English from American movies and music, and from listening secretly to the BBC. Before the war, their only chance at a normal life was to flee the country—a nearly impossible feat. Their future in Saddam’s Iraq was, as the Metallica fan in Mosul put it, “a one-way road leading to nothing.” I thought of them as oddballs, like misunderstood high-school students whose isolation ends when they go off to college. In a similar way, the four years of the war created intense friendships, but they were forged through collective disappointment. The arc from hope to betrayal that traverses the Iraq war is nowhere more vivid than in the lives of these Iraqis. America’s failure to understand, trust, and protect its closest friends in Iraq is a small drama that contains the larger history of defeat.
An interpreter named Firas—he insisted on using his real name—grew up in a middle-class Shia family in a prosperous Baghdad neighborhood. He is a big man in his mid-thirties with a shaved head, and his fierce, heavily ringed eyes provide a glimpse into the reserves of energy that lie beneath his phlegmatic surface. As a young man, Firas was shut out of a government job by his family’s religious affiliation and by his lack of connections. He wasted his twenties in a series of petty occupations: selling cigarettes wholesale; dealing in spare parts; peddling books on Mutanabi Street, in old Baghdad. Books, more than anything, shaped Firas’s passionately melancholy character. As a young man, he kept a credo on his wall in English and Arabic: “Be honest without the thought of Heaven or Hell.” He was particularly impressed by “The Outsider,” a 1956 philosophical work by the British existentialist Colin Wilson. “He wrote about the ‘non-belonger,’ ” Firas explained. Firas felt like an exile in his own land, but, he recalled, “There was always this sound in the back of my head: the time will come, the change will come, my time will come. And when 2003 came, I couldn’t believe how right I was.”
Overnight, everything was new. Americans, whom he had seen only in movies, rolled through the streets. Men who had been silent all their lives cursed Saddam in front of their neighbors. The fall of the regime revealed traits that Iraqis had kept hidden: the greed that drove some to loot, the courage that made others stay on the job. Firas felt a lifelong depression lift. “The first thing I learned about myself was that I can make things happen,” he said. “When you feel that you are an outcast, you don’t really put an effort in anything. But after the war I would run here and there, I would kill myself, I would focus on one thing and not stop until I do it.”
Thousands of Iraqis converged on the Palestine Hotel and, later, the Green Zone, in search of work with the Americans. In the chaos of the early days, a demonstrable ability to speak English—sometimes in a chance encounter with a street patrol—was enough to get you hired by an enterprising Marine captain. Firas began working in military intelligence. Almost all the Iraqis who were hired became interpreters, and American soldiers called them “terps,” often giving them nicknames for convenience and, later, security (Firas became Phil). But what the Iraqis had to offer went well beyond linguistic ability: each of them was, potentially, a cultural adviser, an intelligence officer, a policy analyst. Firas told the soldiers not to point with their feet, not to ask to be introduced to someone’s sister. Interpreters assumed that their perspective would be valuable to foreigners who knew little or nothing of Iraq.
Whenever I asked Iraqis what kind of government they had wanted to replace Saddam’s regime, I got the same answer: they had never given it any thought. They just assumed that the Americans would bring the right people, and the country would blossom with freedom, prosperity, consumer goods, travel opportunities. In this, they mirrored the wishful thinking of American officials and neoconservative intellectuals who failed to plan for trouble. Almost no Iraqi claimed to have anticipated videos of beheadings, or Moqtada al-Sadr, or the terrifying question “Are you Sunni or Shia?” Least of all did they imagine that America would make so many mistakes, and persist in those mistakes to the point that even fair-minded Iraqis wondered about ulterior motives. In retrospect, the blind faith that many Iraqis displayed in themselves and in America seems naïve. But, now that Iraq’s demise is increasingly regarded as foreordained, it’s worth recalling the optimism among Iraqis four years ago.
Ali, an interpreter in Baghdad, spent his childhood in Pennsylvania and Oklahoma, where his father was completing his graduate studies. In 1987, when Ali was eleven and his father was shortly to get his green card, the family returned to Baghdad for a brief visit. But it was during the war with Iran, and the authorities refused to let them leave again. Ali had to learn Arabic from scratch. He grew up in Ghazaliya, a Baathist stronghold in western Baghdad where Shia families like his were rare. Iraq felt like a prison, and Ali considered his American childhood a paradise lost.
In 2003, soon after the arrival of the Americans, soldiers in his neighborhood persuaded him to work as an interpreter with the 82nd Airborne Division. He wore a U.S. Army uniform and a bandanna, and during interrogations he used broken Arabic in order to make prisoners think he was American. Although the work was not yet dangerous, an instinct led him to mask his identity and keep his job to himself around the neighborhood. Ali found that, although many soldiers were friendly, they often ignored information and advice from their Iraqi employees. Interpreters would give them names of insurgents, and nothing would happen. When Ali suggested that soldiers buy up locals’ rocket-propelled grenade launchers so that they would not fall into the hands of insurgents, he was disregarded. When interpreters drove onto the base, their cars were searched, and at the end of their shift they would sometimes find their car doors unlocked or a mirror broken—the cars had been searched again. “People came with true faces to the Americans, with complete loyalty,” Ali said. “But, from the beginning, they didn’t trust us.”
Ali initially worked the night shift at a base in his neighborhood and walked home by himself after midnight. In June, 2003, the Americans mounted a huge floodlight at the front gate of the base, and when Ali left for home the light projected his shadow hundreds of feet down the street. “It’s dangerous,” he told the soldiers at the gate. “Can’t you turn it off when we go out?”
“Don’t be scared,” the soldiers told him. “There’s a sniper protecting you all the way.”
A couple of weeks later, one of Ali’s Iraqi friends was hanging out with the snipers in the tower, and he thanked them. “For what?” the snipers asked. For looking out for us, Ali’s friend said. The snipers didn’t know what he was talking about, and when he told them they started laughing.
“We got freaked out,” Ali said. The message was clear: You Iraqis are on your own.
A PERSON IN BETWEEN
The Arabic for “collaborator” is aameel—literally, “agent.” Early in the occupation, the Baathists in Ali’s neighborhood, who at first had been cowed by the Americans’ arrival, began a shrewd whispering campaign. They told their neighbors that the Iraqi interpreters who went along on raids were feeding the Americans false information, urging the abuse of Iraqis, stealing houses, and raping women. In the market, a Baathist would point at an Iraqi riding in the back of a Humvee and say, “He’s a traitor, a thug.” Such rumors were repeated often enough that people began to believe them, especially as the promised benefits of the American occupation failed to materialize. Before long, Ali told me, the Baathists “made the reputation of the interpreter very, very low—worse than the Americans’.”
There was no American campaign to counter the word on the street; there wasn’t even a sense that these subversive rumors posed a serious threat. “Americans are living in another world,” Ali said. “There’s an Iraqi saying: ‘He’s sleeping and his feet are baking in the sun.’ ” The U.S. typically provided interpreters with inferior or no body armor, allowing the Baathists to make a persuasive case that Americans treated all Iraqis badly, even those who worked for them.
“The Iraqis aren’t trusting you, and the Americans don’t trust you from the beginning,” Ali said. “You became a person in between.”
Firas met the personal interpreter of L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority—which governed Iraq for fourteen months after the invasion—in the fall of 2003. Soon, Firas had secured a privileged view of official America, translating documents at the Republican Palace, in the Green Zone.
He liked most of the American officials who came and went at the palace. Even when he saw colossal mistakes at high levels—for example, Bremer’s decision to abolish the Iraqi Army—Firas admired his new colleagues, and believed that they were helping to create institutions that would lead to a better future. And yet Firas kept being confronted by fresh ironies: he had less authority than any of the Americans, although he knew more about Iraq; and the less that Americans knew about Iraq the less they wanted to hear from him, especially if they occupied high positions.
One day, Firas accompanied one of Bremer’s top political advisers to a meeting with an important Shiite cleric. The cleric’s mosque, the Baratha, is an ancient Shiite bastion, and Firas, whose family came from the holy city of Najaf, knew a great deal about the mosque and the cleric. On the way, the adviser asked, “Is this a mosque or a shrine or what?” Firas said, “It’s the Baratha mosque,” and he started to explain its significance, but the adviser cut him short: “O.K., got it.” They went into the meeting with the cleric, who was from a hard-line party backed by Tehran but who spoke as if he represented the views of all Iraqis. He didn’t represent the views of many people Firas knew, and, given the chance, Firas could have told the adviser that the mosque and its Imam had a history of promoting Shia nationalism. “There were a million comments in my head,” Firas recalled. “Why the hell was he paying so much attention to this Imam?”
Bremer and his advisers—Scott Carpenter, Meghan O’Sullivan, and Roman Martinez—were creating an interim constitution and negotiating the transfer of power to Iraqis, but they did not speak Arabic and had no background in the Middle East. The Iraqis they spent time with were, for the most part, returned exiles with sectarian agendas. The Americans had little sense of what ordinary Iraqis were experiencing, and they seemed oblivious of a readily available source of knowledge: the Iraqi employees who had lived in Baghdad for years, and who went home to its neighborhoods every night. “These people would consider themselves too high to listen to a translator,” Firas said. “Maybe they were interested more in telling D.C. what they want to hear instead of telling them what the Iraqis are saying.”
Later, when the Coalition Provisional Authority was replaced by the U.S. Embassy, and political appointees gave way to career diplomats, Firas found himself working for a different kind of American. The Embassy’s political counsellor, Robert Ford, his deputy, Henry Ensher, and a younger official in the political section, Jeffrey Beals, spoke Arabic, had worked extensively in the region, and spent most of their time in Baghdad talking to a range of Iraqis, including extremists. They gave Firas and other “foreign-service nationals” more authority, encouraging them to help write reports on Iraqi politics that were sometimes forwarded to Washington. Beals would be interviewed in Arabic on Al Jazeera and then endure a thorough critique by an Iraqi colleague—Ahmed, a tall, handsome Kurdish Shiite who lived just outside Sadr City, and who was obsessed with Iraqi politics. When Firas, Ali, and Ahmed visited New York during a training trip, Beals’s brother was their escort.
Beals quit the foreign service after almost two years in Iraq and is now studying history at Columbia University. He said that, with Americans in Baghdad coming and going every six or twelve months, “the lowest rung on your ladder ends up being the real institutional memory and repository of expertise—which is always a tension, because it’s totally at odds with their status.” The inversion of the power relationship between American officials and Iraqi employees became more dramatic as the dangers increased and American civilians lost almost all mobility around Baghdad. Beals said, “There aren’t many people with pro-American eyes and the means to get their message across who can go into Sadr City and tell you what’s happening day to day.”
BADGES
On the morning of January 18, 2004, a suicide truck bomber detonated a massive payload amid a line of vehicles waiting to enter the Green Zone by the entry point known as the Assassins’ Gate. Most Iraqis working in the Green Zone knew someone who died in the explosion, which incinerated twenty-five people. Ali was hit by the blowback but was otherwise uninjured; two months later, he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt while driving to work. Throughout 2004, the murder of interpreters and other Iraqi employees became increasingly commonplace. Seven of Ali’s friends who worked with the U.S. military were killed, which prompted him to leave the Army and take a job at the Embassy.
In Mosul, insurgents circulated a DVD showing the decapitations of two military interpreters. American soldiers stationed there expressed sympathy to their Iraqi employees, but, one interpreter told me, there was “no real reaction”: no offer of protection, in the form of a weapons permit or a place to live on base. He said, “The soldiers I worked with were friends and they felt sorry for us—they were good people—but they couldn’t help. The people above them didn’t care. Or maybe the people above them didn’t care.” This story repeated itself across the country: Iraqi employees of the U.S. military began to be kidnapped and killed in large numbers, and there was essentially no American response. Titan Corporation, of Chantilly, Virginia, which until December held the Pentagon contract for employing interpreters in Iraq, was notorious among Iraqis for mistreating its foreign staff. I spoke with an interpreter who was injured in a roadside explosion; Titan refused to compensate him for the time he spent recovering from second-degree burns on his hands and feet. An Iraqi woman working at an American base was recognized by someone she had known in college, who began calling her with death threats. She told me that when she went to the Titan representative for help he responded, “You have two choices: move or quit.” She told him that if she quit and stayed home, her life would be in danger. “That’s not my business,” the representative said. (A Titan spokesperson said, “The safety and welfare of all employees, including, of course, contract workers, is the highest priority.”)
A State Department official in Iraq sent a cable to Washington criticizing the Americans’ “lackadaisical” attitude about helping Iraqi employees relocate. In an e-mail to me, he said, “Most of them have lived secret lives for so long that they are truly a unique ‘homeless’ population in Iraq’s war zone—dependent on us for security and not convinced we will take care of them when we leave.” It’s as if the Americans never imagined that the intimidation and murder of interpreters by other Iraqis would undermine the larger American effort, by destroying the confidence of Iraqis who wanted to give it support. The problem was treated as managerial, not moral or political.
One day in January, 2005, Riyadh Hamid, a Sunni father of six from the Embassy’s political section, was shot to death as he left his house for work. When Firas heard the news at the Embassy, he was deeply shaken: he, Ali, or Ahmed could be next. But he never thought of quitting. “At that time, I believed more in my cause, so if I die for it, let it be,” he said.
Americans and Iraqis at the Embassy collected twenty thousand dollars in private donations for Hamid’s widow. At first, the U.S. government refused to pay workmen’s compensation, because Hamid had been travelling between home and work and was not technically on the job when he was killed. (Eventually, compensation was approved.) A few days after the murder, Robert Ford, the political counsellor, arranged a conversation between Ambassador John Negroponte and the Iraqis from the political section, whom the Ambassador had never met. The Iraqis were escorted into a room in a secure wing of the Embassy’s second floor.
Negroponte had barely expressed his condolences when Firas, Ahmed, and their colleagues pressed him with a single request. They wanted identification that would allow them to enter the Green Zone through the priority lane that Americans with government clearance used, instead of having to wait every morning for an hour or two in a very long line with every other Iraqi who had business in the Green Zone. This line was an easy target for suicide bombers and insurgent lookouts (known in Iraq as alaasa—“chewers”). Iraqis at the Embassy had been making this request for some time, without success. “Our problem is badges,” the Iraqis told the Ambassador.
Negroponte sent for the Embassy’s regional security officer, John Frese. “Here’s the man who is responsible for badges,” Negroponte said, and left.
According to the Iraqis, they asked Frese for green badges, which were a notch below the official blue American badges. These allowed the holder to enter through the priority lane and then be searched inside the gate.
“I can’t give you that,” Frese said.
“Why?”
“Because it says ‘Weapon permit: yes.’ ”
“Change the ‘yes’ to ‘no’ for us.”
Frese’s tone was peremptory: “I can’t do that.”
Ahmed made another suggestion: allow the Iraqis to use their Embassy passes to get into the priority lane. Frese again refused. Ahmed turned to one of his colleagues and said, in Arabic, “We’re blowing into a punctured bag.”
“My top priority is Embassy security, and I won’t jeopardize it, no matter what,” Frese told them, and the Iraqis understood that this security did not extend to them—if anything, they were part of the threat.
After the meeting, a junior American diplomat who had sat through it was on the verge of tears. “This is what always calmed me down,” Firas said. “I saw Americans who understand me, trust me, believe me, love me. This is what always kept my rage under control and kept my hope alive.”
When I recently asked a senior government official in Washington about the badges, he insisted, “They are concerns that have been raised, addressed, and satisfactorily resolved. We acted extremely expeditiously.” In fact, the matter was left unresolved for almost two years, until late 2006, when verbal instructions were given to soldiers at the gates of the Green Zone to let Iraqis with Embassy passes into the priority lane—and even then individual soldiers, among whom there was rapid turnover, often refused to do so.
Americans and Iraqis recalled the meeting as the moment when the Embassy’s local employees began to be disenchanted. If Negroponte had taken an interest, he could have pushed Frese to change the badges. But a diplomat doesn’t rise to Negroponte’s stature by busying himself with small-bore details, and without his directive the rest of the bureaucracy wouldn’t budge.
In Baghdad, the regional security officer had unusual power: to investigate staff members, to revoke clearances, to block diplomats’ trips outside the Green Zone. The word “security” was ubiquitous—a “magical word,” one Iraqi said, that could justify anything. “Saying no to the regional security officer is a dangerous thing,” according to a second former Embassy official, who occasionally did say no in order to be able to carry out his job. “You’re taking a lot of responsibility on yourself.” Although Iraqi employees had been vetted with background checks and took regular lie-detector tests, a permanent shadow of suspicion lay over them because they lived outside the Green Zone. Firas once attended a briefing at which the regional security officer told newly arrived Americans that no Iraqi could be trusted.
The reminders were constant. Iraqi staff members were not allowed into the gym or the food court near the Embassy. Banned from the military PX, they had to ask an American supervisor to buy them a pair of sunglasses or underwear. These petty humiliations were compounded by security officers who easily crossed the line between vigilance and bullying.
One day in late 2004, Laith, who had never given up hope of working for the American Embassy, did well on an interview in the Green Zone and was called to undergo a polygraph. After he was hooked up to the machine, the questions began: Have you ever lied to your family? Do you know any insurgents? At some point, he thought too hard about his answer; when the test was over, the technician called in a security officer and shouted at Laith: “Do you think you can fuck with the United States? Who sent you here?” Laith was hustled out to the gate, where the technician promised to tell his employers at the National Endowment for Democracy to fire him.
“That was the first time I hated the Americans,” Laith said.
CORRIDORS OF POWER
In January, 2005, Kirk Johnson, a twenty-four-year-old from Illinois, arrived in Baghdad as an information officer with the United States Agency for International Development. He came from a patriotic family that believed in public service; his father was a lawyer whose chance at an open seat in Congress, in 1986, was blocked when the state Republican Party chose a former wrestling coach named Dennis Hastert to run instead. Johnson, an Arabic speaker, was studying Islamist thought as a Fulbright scholar in Cairo when the war began; when he arrived in Baghdad, he became one of U.S.A.I.D.’s few Arabic-speaking Americans in Iraq.
Johnson, who is rangy, earnest, and baby-faced, thought that he was going to help America rebuild Iraq, in a mission that was his generation’s calling. Instead, he found a “narcotic” atmosphere in the Green Zone. Surprisingly few Americans ever ventured outside its gates. A short drive from the Embassy, at the Blue Star Café—famous for its chicken fillet and fries—contractors could be seen, in golf shirts, khakis, and baseball caps, enjoying a leisurely lunch, their Department of Defense badges draped around their necks. At such moments, it was hard not to have uncharitable thoughts about the war—that Americans today aren’t equipped for something of this magnitude. Iraq is that rare war in which people put on weight. An Iraqi woman at the Embassy who had seen many Americans come and go—and revered a few of them—declared that seventy per cent of them were “useless, crippled,” avoiding debt back home or escaping a bad marriage. I met an American official who, during one year, left the Green Zone less than half a dozen times; unlike many of his colleagues, he understood this to be a problem.
The deeper the Americans dug themselves into the bunker, the harder they tried to create a sense of normalcy, resulting in what Johnson called “a bizarre arena of paperwork and booze.” There were karaoke nights and volleyball leagues, the Baghdad Regatta, and “Country Night—One Howdy-Doody Good Time.” Halliburton, the defense contractor, hosted a Middle Eastern Night. The cubicles in U.S.A.I.D.’s new Baghdad office building, Johnson discovered, were exactly the same as the cubicles at its headquarters in Washington. The more chaotic Iraq became, the more the Americans resorted to bureaucratic gestures of control. The fact that it took five signatures to get Adobe Acrobat installed on a computer was strangely comforting.
Johnson learned that Iraqis were third-class citizens in the Green Zone, after Americans and other foreigners. For a time, Americans were ordered to wear body armor while outdoors; when Johnson found out that Iraqi staff members hadn’t been provided with any, he couldn’t bear to wear his own around them. Superiors eventually ordered him to do so. “If you’re still properly calibrated, it can be a shameful sort of existence there,” Johnson said. “It takes a certain amount of self-delusion not to be brought down by it.”
In October, 2004, two bombs killed four Americans and two Iraqis at a café and a shopping center inside the Green Zone, fuelling the suspicion that there were enemies within. The Iraqi employees became perceived as part of an undifferentiated menace. They also induced a deeper, more elusive form of paranoia. As Johnson put it, “Not that we thought they’d do us bodily harm, but they represented the reality beyond those blast walls. You keep your distance from these Iraqis, because if you get close you start to discover it’s absolute bullshit—the lives of people in Baghdad aren’t safer, in spite of our trend lines or ginned-up reports by contractors that tell you everything is going great.”
After eight months in the Green Zone, Johnson felt that the impulse which had originally made him volunteer to work in Iraq was dying. He got a transfer to Falluja, to work on the front lines of the insurgency.
The Iraqis who saw both sides of the Green Zone gates had to be as alert as prey in a jungle of predators. Ahmed, the Kurdish Shiite, had the job of reporting on Shia issues, and his feel for the mood in Sadr City was crucial to the political section. When a low-flying American helicopter tore a Shia religious flag off a radio tower, Ahmed immediately picked up on rumors, started by the Mahdi Army, that Americans were targeting Shia worshippers. His job required him to seek contact with members of Shiite militias, who sometimes reacted to him with suspicion. He once went to a council meeting near Sadr City that had been called to arrange a truce between the Americans and the Mahdi Army so that garbage could be cleared from the streets. A council member confronted Ahmed, demanding to know who he was. Ahmed responded, “I’m from a Korean organization. They sent me to find out what solution you guys come up with. Then we’re ready to fund the cleanup.” At another meeting, he identified himself as a correspondent from an Iraqi television network. No one outside his immediate family knew where he worked.
Ahmed took two taxis to the Green Zone, then walked the last few hundred yards, or drove a different route every day. He carried a decoy phone and hid his Embassy phone in his car. He had always loved the idea of wearing a jacket and tie in an official job, but he had to keep them in his office at the Embassy—it was impossible to drive to work dressed like that. Ahmed and the other Iraqis entered code names for friends and colleagues into their phones, in case they were kidnapped. Whenever they got a call in public from an American contact, they answered in Arabic and immediately hung up. They communicated mostly by text message. They never spoke English in front of their children. One Iraqi employee slept in his car in the Green Zone parking lot for several nights, because it was too dangerous to go home.
Baghdad, which has six million residents, at least provided the cover of anonymity. In a small Shia city in the south, no one knew that a twenty-six-year-old Shiite named Hussein was working for the Americans. “I lie and lie and lie,” he said. He acted as a go-between, carrying information between the U.S. outpost, the local government, the Shia clergy, and the radical Sadrists. The Americans would send him to a meeting of clerics with a question, such as whether Iranian influence was fomenting violence. Instead of giving a direct answer, the clerics would demand to know why thousands of American soldiers were unable to protect Shia travellers on a ten-kilometre stretch of road. Hussein would take this back to the Americans and receive a “yes-slash-no kind of answer: We will take it up, we’ll get back to them soon—the soon becomes never.” In this way, he was privy to both sides of the deepening mutual disenchantment. The fact that he had no contact with Sunnis did not make Hussein feel any safer: by 2004, Shia militias were also targeting Iraqis who worked with Americans.
As a youth, Hussein was an overweight misfit obsessed with Second World War documentaries, and now he felt grateful to the Americans for freeing him from Saddam’s tyranny. He also took a certain pride and pleasure in carrying off his risky job. “I’m James Bond, without the nice lady or the famous gadgets,” he said. He worked out of a series of rented rooms, seldom going out in public, relying on his cell phone and his laptop, keeping a small “runaway bag” with him in case he needed to leave quickly (a neighbor once informed him that some strangers had asked who lived there, and Hussein moved out the same day). Every few days, he brought his laundry to his parents’ house. He stopped seeing friends, and his life winnowed down to his work. “You have to live two separate lives, one visible and the other one invisible,” Hussein told me when we spoke in Erbil. (He insisted on meeting in Kurdistan, because there was nowhere else in Iraq that he felt safe being seen with me.) “You have to always be aware of the car behind you. When you want to park, you make sure that the car passes you. You’re always afraid of a person staring at you in an abnormal way.”
He received three threats. The first was graffiti written across his door, the second a note left outside his house. Both said, “Leave your job or we’ll kill you.” The third came in December, after American soldiers killed a local militia leader who had been one of Hussein’s most important contacts. A friend approached Hussein and conveyed an anonymous warning: “You better not have anything to do with this event. If you do, you’ll have to take the consequences.” Since Hussein was known to have interpreted for American soldiers at the start of the war, he said, his name had long been on the Mahdi Army’s blacklist. It was not just frightening but also embarrassing to be a suspect in the militia leader’s death; it undermined Hussein in the eyes of his carefully cultivated contacts. “The stamp that comes to you will never go—you will stay a spy,” he said.
He informed his American supervisor, as he had after the previous two threats. And the reply was the same: lie low, take a leave with pay. Hussein had warm feelings for his supervisor, but he wanted a transfer to another country in the Middle East or a scholarship offer to the U.S.—some tangible sign that his safety mattered to them. None was forthcoming. Once, in April, 2004, when the Mahdi Army had overrun Coalition posts all over southern Iraq, he had asked to be evacuated along with the Americans and was refused; his pride wouldn’t let him ask again. Soon after Hussein received his third threat, his supervisor left Iraq.
“You are now belonging to no side,” Hussein said.
In June, 2006, with kidnappings and sectarian killings out of control in Baghdad, the number of Iraqis working in the Embassy’s public-affairs section dropped from nine to four; most of those who quit fled the country. The Americans began to replace them with Jordanians. The switch was deeply unpopular with the remaining Iraqis, who understood that it involved the fundamental issue of trust: Jordanians could be housed in the Green Zone without fear (Iraqis could secure temporary housing for only a limited time); Jordanians were issued badges that allowed them into the Embassy without being searched; they weren’t subject to threat and blackmail, because they lived inside the Green Zone. In every way, Jordanians were easier to deal with. But they also knew nothing about Iraq. One former Embassy official, who considered the new policy absurd, lamented that a Jordanian couldn’t possibly understand that the term “February 8th mustache,” say, referred to the 1963 Baathist coup.
In the past year, the U.S. government has lost a quarter of its two hundred and six Iraqi employees, and many have been replaced by Jordanians. Not long ago, the U.S. began training citizens of the Republic of Georgia to fill the jobs of Iraqis in Baghdad. “I don’t know why it’s better to have these people flown into Iraq and secure them in the Green Zone,” a State Department official said. “Why wouldn’t we bring Iraqis into the Green Zone and give them housing and secure them?” He added, “We’re depriving people of jobs and we’re getting them whacked. It’s not a pretty picture.”
On June 6th, amid the exodus of Iraqis from the public-affairs section, an Embassy official sent a six-page cable to Washington whose subject line read “Public Affairs Staff Show Strains of Social Discord.” The cable described the nightmarish lives of the section’s Iraqi employees and the sectarian tensions rising among them. It was an astonishingly candid report, perhaps aimed at forcing the State Department to confront the growing disaster. The cable was leaked to the Washington Post and briefly became a political liability. One sentence has stuck in my mind: “A few staff members approached us to ask what provisions we would make for them if we evacuate.”
I went to Baghdad in January partly because I wanted to find an answer to this question. Were there contingency plans for Iraqis, and, if so, whom did they include, and would the Iraqis have to wait for a final American departure? Would any Iraqis be evacuated to the U.S.? No one at the Embassy was willing to speak on the record about Iraqi staff, except an official spokesman, Lou Fintor, who read me a statement: “Like all residents of Baghdad, our local employees must attempt to maintain their daily routines despite the disruptions caused by terrorists, extremists, and criminals. The new Iraqi government is taking steps to improve the security situation and essential services in Baghdad. The Iraq security forces, in coördination with coalition forces, are now engaged in a wide-range effort to stabilize the security situation in Baghdad. . . . President Bush strongly reaffirmed our commitment to work with the government of Iraq to answer the needs of all Iraqis.”
I was granted an interview with two officials, who refused to be named. One of them consulted talking points that catalogued what the Embassy had done for Iraqi employees: a Thanksgiving dinner, a recent thirty-five-per-cent salary increase. Housing in the Green Zone could be made available for a week at a time in critical cases, I was told, though most Iraqis didn’t want to be apart from their families. When I asked about contingency plans for evacuation, the second official refused to discuss it on security grounds, but he said, “If we reach that point and have people in danger, the Ambassador would go to the Secretary of State and ask that they be evacuated, and I think they would do it.” The department was reviewing the possibility of issuing special immigrant visas.
To receive this briefing, I had passed through three security doors into the Embassy’s classified section, where there were no Iraqis and no natural light; it seemed as if every molecule of Baghdad air had been sealed off behind the last security door. The Embassy officials struck me as decent, overworked people, yet I left the interview with a feeling of shame. The problem lay not with the individuals but with the institution and, beyond that, with the politics of the American project in Iraq, which from the beginning has been conducted under the illusion that controlling the message mattered more than the reality. A former official at the Embassy told me, “When we say that the corridors of power are insulated, is it that the officials aren’t receiving the information, or is it because the construct under which they’re operating doesn’t even allow them to absorb it?” To admit that Iraqis who work with Americans need to be evacuated would blow a hole in the Administration’s version of the war.
Several days after the interview at the Embassy, I had a more frank conversation with an official there. “I don’t know if it’s fair to say, ‘You work at an embassy of a foreign country, so that country has to evacuate you,’ ” he said. “Do the Australians have a plan? Do the Romanians? The Turks? The British?” He added, “If I worked at the Hungarian Embassy in Washington, would the Hungarians evacuate me from the United States?”
When I mentioned these remarks to Othman, he asked, “Would the Americans behead an American working at the Hungarian Embassy in Washington?”
THE HEARTS OF YOUR ALLIES
In the summer of 2006, Iraqis were fleeing the country at the rate of forty thousand per month. The educated middle class of Baghdad was decamping to Jordan and Syria, taking with them the skills and the more secular ideas necessary for rebuilding a destroyed society, leaving the city to the religious militias—eastern Baghdad was controlled by the poor and increasingly radical Shia, the western districts dominated by Sunni insurgents. House by house, the capital was being ethnically cleansed.
By that time, Firas, Ali, and Ahmed had been working with the Americans for several years. Their commitment and loyalty were beyond doubt. Just going to work in the morning required an extraordinary ability to disregard danger. Panic, Firas realized, could trap you: when the threat came, you felt you were a dead man no matter where you turned, and your mind froze and you sat at home waiting for them to come for you. In order to function, Firas simply blocked out the fear. “My friends at work became the only friends I have,” he said. “My entertainment is at work, my pleasure is at work, everything is at work.” Firas and his friends never imagined that the decision to leave Iraq would be forced on them not by the violence beyond the Green Zone but from within the Embassy itself.
After the bombing of the gold-domed Shia mosque in Samarra that February, Sadr City had become the base for the Mahdi Army’s roving death squads. Ahmed’s neighborhood fell under their complete control, and his drive to work took him through numerous unfriendly—and thorough—militia checkpoints. Strangers began to ask about him. A falafel vender in Sadr City whose stall was often surrounded by Mahdi Army alaasa warned Ahmed that his name had come up. On two occasions, people he scarcely knew approached him and expressed concern about his well-being. One evening, an American official named Oliver Moss, with whom Ahmed was close, walked him out of the Embassy to the parking lot and said, “Ahmed, I know you work for us, but if something happens to you we won’t be able to do anything for you.” Ahmed asked for a cot in a Green Zone trailer and was given the yes/no answer—equal parts personal sympathy and bureaucratic delay—which sometimes felt worse than a flat refusal. The chaos in Baghdad had created a landgrab for Green Zone accommodations, and the Iraqi government was distributing coveted apartments to friends of the political parties while evicting Iraqis who worked with the Americans. The interpreters were distrusted and despised even by officials of the new government that the Americans had helped bring to power.
In April, a Shiite member of the parliament asked Ahmed to look into the status of a Mahdi Army member who had been detained by the Americans. Iraqis at the Embassy sometimes used their office to do small favors for their compatriots; such gestures reminded them that they were serving Iraq as well as America. But Ahmed sent his inquiry through the wrong channel. His supervisor was on leave in the U.S., and so he sent an e-mail to a reserve colonel in the political section. The colonel refused to provide him with any information, and a couple of weeks later, in May, Ahmed was summoned to talk to an agent from the regional security office.
To the Iraqis, a summons of this type was frightening. Ahmed and his friends had seen several colleagues report to the regional security office and never appear at their desks again, with no explanation; one had been turned over to the Iraqi police and was jailed for several weeks. “Don’t go. They’re going to arrest you,” Ali told Ahmed. “Just quit. It’s not worth it.” Ahmed did not listen.
The agent, Barry Hale, who carried a Glock pistol, questioned Ahmed for an hour about his contacts with Sadrists. The notion that Ahmed’s job required him to have contact with the Mahdi Army seemed foreign to Hale, as did the need to have well-informed Iraqis in the political section of the Embassy. According to an American official close to the case, Hale had a general distrust of Iraqis and wanted to replace them with Jordanians. Another official spoke of a “paranoia partly founded on ignorance. If Ahmed wanted to hurt an American, he could have done it very easily in the three years he worked with us.”
Robert Ford, the political counsellor, spoke to top officials at the Embassy to insure that Ahmed—whom several Americans described as the best Iraqi employee they had worked with—would be “counselled” but not fired. Everyone assumed that the case was closed. But over the summer, after Ford’s service in Baghdad ended, Hale started to pursue Ahmed again. “It was a witch hunt,” one of the officials said. “They wanted to fire him and they were just looking for a reason. They decided he was a threat.” The irony of his situation was not lost on Ahmed: he was suspected of giving information to a militia that would kill him instantly if they knew where he worked.
In late July, Hale summoned Ahmed again. On Hale’s desk, Ahmed saw a thick file marked “Secret,” next to a pair of steel handcuffs.
“Did you ever get a phone call from the Mahdi Army?” Hale asked.
“I’ll be lucky if I get a phone call from them,” Ahmed replied. “My supervisor will be very happy.”
The interrogation came down to one point: Hale insisted that Ahmed had misled him by saying that the reserve colonel had “never answered” Ahmed’s inquiry, when in fact the colonel had sent back an e-mail asking who had given Ahmed the detainee’s name. Ahmed hadn’t considered this an answer to his question about the detainee’s status, and therefore hadn’t mentioned it to Hale. This was his undoing.
When Ahmed returned to his desk, Firas and Ali embraced him and congratulated him on escaping detention. Meanwhile, lower-ranking Embassy officials began frantically calling and e-mailing colleagues in Washington, some of whom tried to intervene on Ahmed’s behalf. But by then it was too late. The new Ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, and his deputy were out of the country, and the official in charge of the Embassy was Ford’s replacement, Margaret Scobey, a new arrival in Baghdad, who had no idea of Ahmed’s value. Firas said of her, “She was really not into the Iraqis in the office.” Some Americans and Iraqis described her as a notetaker for the Ambassador who sent oddly upbeat reports back to Washington. Two days after the second interrogation, Scobey signed off on Ahmed’s termination, and ordered a junior officer named Rebecca Fong to go down to Ahmed’s office and, in front of his tearful American and Iraqi colleagues, fire him.
Ahmed later told an American official, “I think the U.S. is still in a war. I don’t think you’re going to win this war if you don’t win the hearts of your allies.” The State Department refused to discuss the case for reasons of privacy and security.
Ahmed’s firing demoralized Americans and Iraqis alike. Fong transferred out of the political section. For Firas, it meant that, no matter how long he worked with the Americans and how many risks he took, he, too, would ultimately be discarded. He began to tell himself, “My turn is coming, my turn is coming”—a perverse echo of his mantra before the fall of Saddam. The Iraqis now felt that, as Ali said, “Heaven doesn’t want us and Hell doesn’t want us. Where will we go?” If the Americans were turning against them, they had no friends at all.
Three days after Ahmed’s departure, Scobey appeared in the Iraqis’ office to say that she was sorry but there was nothing she could have done for Ahmed. Firas listened in disgust before bursting out, “All the sacrifices, all the work, all the devotion mean nothing to you. We are still terrorists in your eyes.” When, a month later, Khalilzad met with a large group of Iraqi employees to hear their concerns, Firas attended reluctantly. After the Iraqis raised the possibility of immigrant visas to the U.S., Khalilzad said, “We want the good Iraqi people to stay in the country.” An Iraqi replied, “If we’re still alive.” Firas, speaking last, told the Ambassador, “We are tense all the time, we don’t know what we are doing, right or wrong. Some Iraqis are more afraid in the Embassy than in the Red Zone”—that is, Baghdad. There was a ripple of laughter among the Iraqis, and Khalilzad couldn’t suppress a smile.
At this point, Firas knew that he would leave Iraq. Through the efforts of Rebecca Fong and Oliver Moss—who pulled strings with counterparts in European embassies in Baghdad—Ahmed, Firas, and Ali obtained visas to Europe. By November, they were gone.
JOHNSON’S LIST
On the morning of October 13th, an Iraqi official with U.S.A.I.D. named Yaghdan left his house in western Baghdad, in search of fuel for his generator. He saw a scrap of paper lying by the garage door. It was a torn sheet of copybook paper—the kind that his agency distributed to schools around Iraq, with date and subject lines printed in English and Arabic. The paper bore a message, in Arabic: “We will cut off heads and throw them in the garbage.” Nearby, against the garden fence, lay the severed upper half of a small dog.
Yaghdan (who wanted his real name used) was a mild, conscientious thirty-year-old from a family of struggling businessmen. Since taking a job with the Americans, in 2003, he had been so cautious that, at first, he couldn’t imagine how his cover had been blown. Then he remembered: Two weeks earlier, as he was showing his badge at the bridge offering entry into the Green Zone, Yaghdan had noticed a man from his neighborhood standing in the same line, watching him. The neighbor worked as a special guard with a Shia militia and must have been the alaas who betrayed him.
Yaghdan’s request for a transfer to a post outside the country was never answered. Instead, U.S.A.I.D. offered him a month’s leave with pay or residence for six months in the agency compound in the Green Zone, which would have meant a long separation from his young wife. Yaghdan said, “I thought, I should not be selfish and put myself as a priority. It wasn’t a happy decision.” Within a week of the threat, Yaghdan and his wife flew to Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.
Yaghdan sent his résumé to several companies in Dubai, highlighting his years of service with an American contractor and U.S.A.I.D. He got a call from a legal office that needed an administrative assistant. “Did you work in the U.S.?” the interviewer asked him. Yaghdan said that his work had been in Iraq. “Oh, in Iraq . . .” He could feel the interviewer pulling back. A man at another office said, “Oh, you worked against Saddam? You betrayed Saddam? The American people are stealing Iraq.” Yaghdan, who is not given to bitterness, finally lost his cool: “No, the Arab people are stealing Iraq!” He didn’t get the job. He was amazed—even in cosmopolitan Dubai, people loved Saddam, especially after his botched execution, in late December. Yaghdan’s résumé was an encumbrance. Iraqis were considered bad Arabs, and Iraqis who worked with the Americans were traitors. The slogans and illusions of Arab nationalism, which had seemed to collapse with the regime of Saddam, were being given a second life by the American failure in Iraq. What hurt Yaghdan most was the looks that said, “You trusted the Americans—and see what happened to you.”
Yaghdan then contacted many American companies, thinking that they, at least, would look favorably on his service. He wasn’t granted a single interview. The only work he could find was as a gofer in the office of a Dubai cleaning company.
Yaghdan’s Emirates visa expired in mid-January, and he had to leave the country and renew the visa in Amman. I met him there. The Jordanians had been turning away young Iraqis at the border and the airport for several months, but they issued Yaghdan and his wife three-day visas, after which they had to pay a daily fine, on top of hotel bills. After a week’s delay, the visas came through, but, upon returning to Dubai, Yaghdan learned that the Emirates would no longer extend the visas of Iraqis. A job offer as an administrative assistant came from a university in Qatar, but the Qataris wouldn’t grant him a visa without a security clearance from the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, which was in the hands of the Shia party whose militia had sent him the death threat. He couldn’t even become a refugee, which would have given him some protection against deportation, because the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had closed its Emirates office years ago. Yaghdan had heard that the only way to get a U.S. visa was through a job offer—nearly impossible to obtain—or by marrying an American, so he didn’t bother to try. He had reached the end of his legal options and would have to return to Iraq by April 1st. “It’s like taking the decision to commit suicide,” he said.
While Yaghdan was in Dubai, news of his dilemma made its way through the U.S.A.I.D. grapevine to Kirk Johnson, the young Arabic speaker who had asked to be transferred to Falluja. By then, Johnson’s life had been turned upside down as well.
In Falluja, Johnson had supervised Iraqis who were clearing out blocked irrigation canals along the Euphrates River. His job was dangerous and seldom rewarding, but it gave him the sense of purpose that he had sought in Iraq. Determined to experience as much as possible, he went out several times a week in a Marine convoy to meet tribal sheikhs and local officials. As he rode through Falluja’s lethal streets, Johnson eyed every bag of trash and parked car for hidden bombs, and practiced swatting away imaginary grenades. After a local sniper shot several marines, Johnson’s anxiety rose even higher.
In December, 2005, after twelve exhausting months in Iraq, during which he lost forty pounds, Johnson went on leave and met his parents for a Christmas vacation in the Dominican Republic. In the middle of the night, Johnson rose unconscious from his hotel bed and climbed onto a ledge outside the second-floor window. A night watchman noticed him staring at an unfinished concrete apartment complex across the road. The night before, the sight of the building had triggered his fear of the sniper, and he had instinctively dropped to the floor of his room. Standing on the ledge, he shouted something and then fell fifteen feet.
Johnson tore open his jaw and forehead and broke his nose, teeth, and wrists. He required numerous surgeries on his shattered face, and stayed in the hospital for several weeks. But it was much longer before he could accept that he would not rejoin the marines and Iraqis he had left in Falluja. There were rumors in Iraq that he had been drunk and was trying to avoid returning. Back home in Illinois, healing in his childhood bed, he dreamed every night that he was in Iraq, unable to save people, or else in mortal peril himself.
In January, 2006, Paul Bremer came through Chicago to promote his book, “My Year in Iraq.” Johnson sat in one of the front rows, ready to challenge Bremer’s upbeat version of the reconstruction, but during the question period Bremer avoided the young man with the bandaged face who was frantically waving his arms, which were still in casts.
Johnson moved to Boston, but he kept thinking about his failure to return to Iraq. One day, he heard the news about Yaghdan, whom he had known in Baghdad, and that night he barely slept. It suddenly occurred to him that this was an injustice he could address. He could send money; he could alert journalists and politicians. He wrote a detailed account of Yaghdan’s situation and sent it to his congressman, Dennis Hastert. But Hastert’s office, which was reeling from the Mark Foley scandal and the midterm elections, told Johnson that it could not help Yaghdan. Johnson wrote an op-ed article calling for asylum for Yaghdan and others like him, and on December 15th it ran in the Los Angeles Times. A U.S.A.I.D. official in Baghdad sent it around to colleagues. Then Johnson began to hear from Iraqis.
First, it was people he knew—former colleagues in desperate circumstances like Yaghdan’s. Iraqis forwarded his article to other Iraqis, and he started to compile a list of names; by January he was getting e-mails from strangers with subject lines like “Can you help me Please?” and “I want to be on the list.” An Iraqi woman who had worked for the Coalition Provisional Authority attached a letter of recommendation written in 2003 by Bernard Kerik, then Iraq’s acting Minister of the Interior. It proclaimed, “Your courage to support the Coalition forces has sent home an irrefutable message: that terror will not rule, that liberty will triumph, and that the seeds of freedom will be planted into the hearts of the great citizens of Iraq.” The woman was now a refugee in Amman.
A former U.S.A.I.D. procurement agent named Ibrahim wrote that he was stranded in Egypt after having paid traffickers twelve thousand dollars to smuggle him from Baghdad to Dubai to Mumbai to Alexandria, with the goal of reaching Europe. When the Egyptian police figured out the scheme, Ibrahim took shelter in a friend’s flat in a Cairo slum. The Egyptians, wary of a popular backlash against rising Shia influence in the Middle East, were denying Iraqis legal status there. Ibrahim didn’t know where to go next: in addition to his immigration troubles, he had an untreated brain tumor.
By the first week of February, Johnson’s list had grown to more than a hundred names. Working tirelessly, he had found a way to channel his desire to do something for Iraq. He assembled the information on a spreadsheet, and on February 5th he took it with him on a bus to Washington—along with Yaghdan’s threat letter and a picture of the severed dog.
Toward the end of January, I travelled to Damascus. Iraqis were tolerated by Syria, which opened its doors in the name of Arab brotherhood. Yet Syria offered them no prospect of earning a living: few Iraqis could get work permits.
About a million Iraqis were now in Syria. Every morning that I visited, there were long lines outside the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office in central Damascus. Forty-five thousand Iraqis had officially registered as refugees, and more were signing up every day, amid reports that the Syrian regime was about to tighten its visa policy and had begun turning people back at the border.
One chilly night, I went to Sayyida Zainab, a neighborhood centered around the shrine of the sister of Hussein, grandson of the Prophet and the central martyr of Shiism. This had become an Iraqi Shia district, and on the main street were butcher shops and kebab stands that reminded me of commercial streets in Baghdad. There were pictures of Shia martyrs, and also of Moqtada al-Sadr, outside the real-estate offices, some of which, I was told, were fronts for brothels. (Large numbers of Iraqi women make their living in Syria as prostitutes.) Shortly before midnight, buses from Baghdad began to pull into a parking lot where boys were still up, playing soccer. One bus had a shattered windshield from gunfire at the start of its journey. A minibus driver told me that the trip took fourteen hours, including a long wait at the border, and that the road through Iraq was menaced by insurgents, criminal gangs, and American patrols. And yet some Iraqis who had run out of money in Damascus hired the driver to take them back to Baghdad the same night. “No one is left there,” he said. “Only those who are too poor to leave, and those with a bad omen on their heads, who will be killed in one of three ways—kidnapping, car bomb, or militias.”
In another Damascus neighborhood, I met a family of four that had just arrived from Baghdad after receiving a warning from insurgents to abandon their house. They had settled in a three-room apartment and were huddled around a kerosene heater. They were middle-class people who had left almost everything behind—the mother had sold her gold and jewelry to pay for plane tickets to Damascus—and the son and daughter hadn’t been able to finish school. The daughter, Zamzam, was seventeen, and in the past few months she had been seeing corpses in the streets on her way to school, some of them eaten by dogs because no one dared to take them away. On days when there was fighting in her neighborhood, Zamzam said, walking to school felt like a death wish. Her laptop computer had a picture of an American flag as its screen saver, but it also had recordings of insurgent ballads in praise of a famous Baghdad sniper. She was an energetic, ambitious girl, but her dark eyes had the haunted look of a much older woman.
I spent a couple of hours walking with the family around the souk and the grand Umayyad Mosque in the old city center. The parents strolled arm in arm—enjoying, they said, a ritual that had been impossible in Baghdad for the past two years. I left them outside a theatre where a comedy featuring an all-Iraqi cast was playing to packed houses of refugees. The play was called “Homesick.”
In the past few months, Western and Arab governments announced that they would no longer honor Iraqi passports issued after the 2003 invasion, since the passport had been so shoddily produced that it was subject to widespread forgery. This was the first passport many Iraqis had ever owned, and it was now worthless. Iraqis with Saddam-era passports were also out of luck, because the Iraqi government had cancelled them. A new series of passports was being printed, but the Ministry of the Interior had ordered only around twenty thousand copies, an Iraqi official told me, far too few to meet the need—which meant that obtaining a valid passport, like buying gas or heating oil, would become subject to black-market influences. In Baghdad, Othman told me that a new passport would cost him six hundred dollars, paid to a fixer with connections at the passport offices. The Ministry of the Interior refused to allow Iraqi Embassies to print the new series, so refugees outside Iraq who needed valid passports would have to return to the country they had fled or pay someone a thousand dollars to do it for them.
Between October, 2005, and September, 2006, the United States admitted two hundred and two Iraqis as refugees, most of them from the years under Saddam. Last year, the Bush Administration increased the allotment to five hundred. By the end of 2006, there were almost two million Iraqis living as refugees outside their country—most of them in Syria and Jordan. American policy held that these Iraqis were not refugees, that they would go back to their country as soon as it was stabilized. The U.S. Embassies in Damascus and Amman continued to turn down almost all visa applications from Iraqis. So the fastest-growing refugee crisis in the world remained hidden, receiving little attention other than in a few reports from organizations like Human Rights Watch and Refugees International.
Then, in early January, U.N.H.C.R. sent out an appeal for sixty million dollars for the support and eventual resettlement of Iraqi refugees. On January 16th, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on refugees, chaired by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, of Massachusetts, held hearings on Iraqi refugees, with a special focus on Iraqis who had worked for the U.S. government. Pressure in Congress and the media began to build, and the Administration scrambled to respond. When an Iraqi employee of the Embassy was killed on January 11th, and one from U.S.A.I.D. on February 14th, statements of condolence were sent out by Ambassador Khalilzad and the chief administrator of U.S.A.I.D.—gestures that few could remember happening before.
In early February, the State Department announced the formation of a task force to deal with the problem of Iraqi refugees. A colleague of Kirk Johnson’s at U.S.A.I.D., who had been skeptical that Johnson’s efforts would achieve anything, wrote to him, “Interesting what a snowball rolled down a hill can cause. This is your baby. Good going.” On February 14th, at a press conference at the State Department, members of the task force declared a new policy: the United States would fund eighteen million dollars of the U.N.H.C.R. appeal, and it would “plan to process expeditiously some seven thousand Iraqi refugee referrals,” which meant that two or three thousand Iraqis might be admitted to the U.S. by the end of the fiscal year. Finally, the Administration would seek legislation to create a special immigrant visa for Iraqis who had worked for the U.S. Embassy.
During the briefing, Ellen Sauerbrey, the Assistant Secretary of State for Population, Refugees, and Migration, insisted, “There was really nothing that was indicating there was any significant issue in terms of outflow until—I would say the first real indication began to reach us three or four months ago.” Speaking of Iraqi employees, she added, “The numbers of those that have actually been seeking either movement out of the country or requesting assistance have been—our own Embassy has said it is a very small number.” Sauerbrey put it at less than fifty.
The excuses were unconvincing, but the stirrings of action were encouraging. When Johnson, wearing the only suit he owned, took his list to Washington and dropped it off at the State Department and the U.N.H.C.R. office, the response was welcoming. But he pressed officials for details on the fates of specific individuals: Would Yaghdan be able to register as a refugee in Dubai, where there was no U.N.H.C.R. office, before he was forced to go back to Iraq? How could Ibrahim, trapped in Egypt without legal travel documents, qualify for a visa before his brain tumor killed him? Would Iraqis who had paid ransom to kidnappers be barred entry under the “material support” clause of the Patriot Act? (One Embassy employee already had been.) How would Iraqis who had no Kirk Johnson to help them—the military interpreters, the Embassy staff, the contractors, the drivers—be able to sign up as refugees or candidates for special immigrant visas? Would the U.S. government seek them out? Would they have to flee the country and find a U.N.H.C.R. office first?
Thanks in part to Johnson’s list, Washington was paying attention. Privately, though, a former U.S.A.I.D. colleague told Johnson that his actions would send the message “that it’s game over” in Iraq, and America would end up with a million and a half asylum seekers. Johnson feared that the ingrained habit of giving yes/no answers might lower the pressure without solving the problem. His list kept growing after he had delivered it to the U.S. government, and the desperation of those already on it grew as well. By mid-March, Iraqis on the list still had no mechanism for applying to immigrate. According to the State Department, a humanitarian visa for Ibrahim would take up to six months. And Yaghdan’s situation was just as dire now as it was when Johnson had written his op-ed. “No matter what is said by the Administration, if Yaghdan isn’t being helped, then the government is not responding,” Johnson told me.
For him, it was a simple matter. “This is the brink right now, where our partners over there are running for their lives,” he said. “I defy anyone to give me the counter-argument for why we shouldn’t let these people in.” He quoted something that President Gerald Ford once said about his decision to admit a hundred and thirty thousand Vietnamese after the fall of Saigon: “To do less would have added moral shame to humiliation.”
EVACUATION
In 2005, Al Jazeera aired a typically heavy-handed piece about the American evacuation from Saigon, in April, 1975, rebroadcasting the famous footage of children and old people being pushed back by marines from the Embassy gates, and kicked or punched as they tried to climb onto helicopters. The message for Iraqis working with Americans was clear, and when some of those who worked at U.S.A.I.D. saw the program they were horrified. The next day at work, a small group of them met to talk about it. “Al Jazeera has their own propaganda. Don’t believe it,” said Ibrahim, the Iraqi who is now hiding out in Cairo.
Hussein, the go-between in southern Iraq, had also begun to think about Vietnam. He had heard that America had left the Vietnamese behind, but he couldn’t believe that the same thing would happen in Iraq. “We might be given a good chance to leave with them,” he said. “I think about that, because history is telling me that they always have a moral obligation.” To Hussein, the obligation was mutual, because he still felt indebted to the Americans for his freedom. I asked him what he would do if he found himself abandoned. Hussein thought about it, then said, “If I reach this point, and I am still alive when I see moral obligation taking the incorrect course, I will say, ‘I paid my debt. I am free.’ ”
At the end of the Vietnam War, Frank Snepp was the C.I.A.’s chief analyst at the American Embassy in Saigon. His 1977 book about the last days of the Vietnam War, “Decent Interval,” describes how the willful ignorance and political illusions of top U.S. officials prevented any serious planning for an evacuation of America’s Vietnamese allies. Thousands were left to the mercy of the Communists. The book contains a photograph of the author, thirty-one at the time, standing on the bridge of the U.S.S. Denver in the South China Sea, three days after being evacuated from Saigon by helicopter. He is leaning against the rail, his tan, handsome face drawn taut as he stares slightly downward. Recently, I asked Snepp what he had been thinking when the picture was taken.
“I was overwhelmed with guilt,” he said. “I kept hearing the voices on the C.I.A. radios of our agents in the field, our Vietnamese friends we wouldn’t be able to rescue. And I had to understand how I had been made a party to this. I had been brought up in the Old South, in a chivalric tradition that comes out of the Civil War—you do not abandon your own. And that’s exactly what I had done. It hasn’t left me to this day.”
No conquering enemy army is days away from taking Baghdad; the city is slowly breaking up into smaller, isolated enclaves, and America’s Iraqi allies are being executed one by one. It’s hard to imagine the American presence in Iraq ending with a dramatic helo lift from a Green Zone landing pad. But, in some ways, the unlikelihood of a spectacularly conclusive finale makes the situation of the Iraqis more perilous than that of the South Vietnamese. It’s easier for the U.S. government to leave them to their fate while telling itself that “the good Iraqis” are needed to build the new Iraq.
American institutions in Vietnam were just as unresponsive as they are in Iraq, but, on an individual level, Americans did far more to evacuate their Vietnamese counterparts. In Saigon they had girlfriends, wives, friends, whereas Americans and Iraqis have established only work relationships, which end when the Americans rotate out after six months or a year. In the wide-open atmosphere of Saigon, many officials, including Snepp, broke rules or risked their lives to save people close to them. Americans in Baghdad don’t have such discipline problems. A former Embassy official pointed out that cell phones and e-mail connect officials in Iraq to their bosses there or in Washington around the clock. “When you can always connect, you can always pass the buck,” he said. For all their technology, the Americans in Baghdad know far less about the Iraqis than those in Saigon knew about the Vietnamese. “Intelligence is the first key to empathy,” Snepp said.
I asked Snepp what he would say to Americans in Iraq today. “If they want to keep their conscience clean, they better start making lists of people they must help,” he said. “They should also not be cautious in questioning their superiors, and that’s a very hard thing to do in a rigid environment.”
Richard Armitage, who was Deputy Secretary of State under Colin Powell during the first years of the Iraq war, served as a naval officer in Vietnam. In the last days of that war, he returned as a civilian, on a mission to destroy military assets before they fell into North Vietnamese hands. He arrived too late, and instead turned his energy to the evacuation of South Vietnamese sailors and their families. Armitage led a convoy of barely seaworthy boats, carrying twenty thousand people, a thousand miles across the South China Sea to Manila—the first stop on their journey to the United States.
When I met Armitage recently, at his office in Arlington, Virginia, he was not confident that Iraqis would be similarly resettled. “I guarantee you no one’s thinking about it now, because it’s so fatalistic and you’d be considered sort of a traitor to the President’s policy,” he said. “I don’t see us taking them in this time, because, notwithstanding what we may owe people, you’re not going to bring in large numbers of Arabs to the United States, given the fact that for the last six years the President has scared the pants off the American public with fears of Islamic terrorism.”
Even at this stage of the war, Armitage said, officials at the White House retain an “agnosticism about the size of the problem.” He added, “The President believes so firmly that he is President for just this mission—and there’s something religious about it—that it will succeed, and that kind of permeates. I just take him at his word these days. I think it’s very improbable that he’ll be successful.”
I was in Baghdad when the Administration announced its new security plan—including an effort to stabilize Baghdad with a “surge” of twenty thousand additional troops. I spent a day with Lieutenant Colonel Steven Miska, who commands a small American base surrounded by a large Iraqi one in the old-line Shia district of Kadhimiya. Everywhere we went, Iraqi civilians asked him when the surge would begin. Two dozen men hanging out at a sidewalk tea shop seemed to have the new strategy confused with the Iraq Study Group Report; I took the mix-up to mean that they were desperate for any possible solution. A Shia potentate named Sheikh Muhammad Baqr gave me his version of the new plan over lunch at his house: the Americans were trying to separate the ten per cent of the population that belonged to extremist militias—whether Shia or Sunni—from what he called the “silent majority.” If families evicted from mixed areas could be convinced to return to their homes, and if unemployed young men could be put to work, the plan had a chance of restoring confidence in the Americans. The Sheikh warned, “In six months you will have to see this plan work, or else the Iraqi people will tell the Americans to find another venue.” The Sheikh had even less faith in the government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, which he called a collection of “sectarian movements” brought to power by American folly. “We don’t need democracy,” he said. “We need General Pinochet in Chile or General Franco in Spain. After they clear the country, we’ll have elections.”
Lieutenant Colonel Miska, for his part, described the security plan as an attempt to get Americans off the big bases and into Iraqi neighborhoods, where they would occupy small combat outposts on the fault lines of sectarian conflicts and, for the first time, make the protection of civilians a central goal. The new plan represented a repudiation of the strategy that the Administration had pursued for the past two years—the handover of responsibility to Iraqi security forces as Americans pulled out of the cities. President Bush had chosen a new commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, who recently oversaw the writing of the Army and Marine Corps’s new counter-insurgency manual. Petraeus has surrounded himself with a brain trust of counter-insurgency experts: Colonel H. R. McMaster, who two years ago executed a nearly identical strategy in the northern city of Tal Afar; Colonel Peter Mansoor; and David Kilcullen, an Australian strategist working at the State Department. Bush named Timothy Carney, a retired ambassador, to be his reconstruction czar in Iraq; Carney had left the Coalition Provisional Authority in disgust after seeing Bremer make mistake after mistake. After four years of displaying resolve while the war was being lost, the President has turned things over to a group of soldiers and civilians who have been steadfast critics of his strategy. It is almost certainly too late.
In Baghdad, among Iraqi civilians and American soldiers, it’s impossible not to want to give the new strategy a try. The alternative, as Iraqis constantly point out, is a much greater catastrophe. “I’m still hoping Bush’s new plan can do something,” Othman told me. In the weeks after the surge was announced, there were anecdotal reports of Shia and Sunni families returning to their homes. But even if this tentative progress continues, three major obstacles remain. The first is the breakdown of U.S. ground forces, in manpower and equipment; it isn’t clear that the strategy can be sustained for more than six months—nowhere near enough time to repair the physical and social destruction of Baghdad.
The second obstacle was described to me by an international official who has spent the past three years in Iraq. “The success of the American strategy is based on a premise that is fundamentally flawed,” he said. “The premise is that the U.S. and Iraqi governments are working toward the same goal. It’s simply not the case.” Shia politicians, the official said, want “to hold on to their majority as long as they can.” Their interest isn’t democracy but power. Meanwhile, Sunni politicians want “to say no to everything,” the official said; the insurgency is politically intractable.
Finally, there is the collapse of political support at home. Most Americans have lost faith in the leadership and conduct of the war, and they want to be rid of it. More important than all the maneuverings in Congress, at the White House, and among the Presidential candidates is the fact that nobody wants to deal with Iraq anymore. The columnist Charles Krauthammer, the most ardent of neoconservative hawks, has found someone to blame for the war’s failure: the Iraqis. He recently wrote, “We midwifed their freedom. They chose civil war.” John Edwards, the Democratic Presidential candidate, is also tired of Iraqis. “We’ve done our part, and now it’s time for them to step up to the plate,” he recently told this magazine. “When they’re doing it to each other, and America’s not there and not fomenting the situation, I think the odds are better of the place stabilizing.” America is pulling away from Iraq in the fitful, irritable manner of someone trying to wake up from an unpleasant sleep. On my last day in Baghdad, I had lunch with an Embassy official, and as we were leaving the restaurant he suddenly said, “Do you think this is all going to seem like a dream? Is it just going to be a fever dream that we’ll wake up from and say, ‘We got into this crazy war, but now it’s over and we never have to think about Iraq again’?” If so, part of our legacy will be thousands of Iraqis who, because they joined the American effort, can no longer live in their own country.
Othman and Laith are still in Baghdad. Earlier this month, Othman spent more than two thousand dollars on passports for his mother, his two younger brothers, and himself. He is hoping to move the family to Syria. Laith wants to find a job in Kurdistan.
Firas, Ali, and Ahmed are now in Sweden. All three of them would have preferred to go to America. Ali had spent his childhood in the United States; Ahmed was fascinated with American politics; Firas never felt more at home than he had on their training trip, listening to jazz in Greenwich Village. Like all Iraqis who worked with Americans, they spoke in American accents, using American idioms. Ahmed delighted in using phrases like “from the horse’s mouth” and “hung out to dry.”
I asked Firas why he hadn’t tried to get a visa to the United States. “And what would I do with it?” he said.
“Ask for asylum.”
“Do you think they would give me an asylum in the U.S.? Never.”
“Why?”
“For the U.S. to give an asylum for an Iraqi, it means they have failed in Iraq.”
This wasn’t entirely true. Recently, Iraqis who made it to America have begun filing petitions for asylum, and, because they undoubtedly face a reasonable fear of harm back home, a few of them have been accepted. A much larger number of Iraqis are still waiting to learn their fates: U.S.A.I.D. employees who jumped ship on training trips to Washington; Fulbright scholars who have been informed by the State Department that they have to go back to Iraq after their two- or three-year scholarships end, even if a job or another degree program is available to them in America. The U.S. government, for which Firas worked for three and a half years, had given him ample reason to believe that he could never become an American. Still, if he had somehow made it here, there is a chance that he could have stayed.
Instead, he is trying to become a Swede. I met him one recent winter morning in Malmö, a city of eighteenth-century storefronts and modern industrial decay at the southern tip of Sweden, just across the Öresund Strait from Copenhagen. He was waiting to hear the result of his asylum petition while living with Ahmed in a refugee apartment block that was rapidly filling up with Iraqis. Since the war began, nearly twenty thousand Iraqis had arrived in the country. Firas was granted asylum in February.
Sweden amazed Firas: the silence of passengers on trains; the intolerance for smoking; the motorists that wait for you to cross the street, as if they were trying to embarrass you with courtesy. When I joked that he would be bored living here, he laughed grimly and said, “Good. I want to be like other people—normal. How long before I can be afraid or shocked? There is nothing that makes me afraid or shocked anymore.”
We walked from the train station to the Turning Torso, a new apartment tower, designed by Santiago Calatrava, that twists ninety degrees on its axis as it rises fifty-four stories into the slate-gray sky, and drank Swedish Pilsners at the Torso Bar and Lounge. When the Americans came to Iraq, four years ago, Firas felt that he could finally begin his life. Now, at thirty-five, he was starting over yet again.
I asked him if he felt betrayed by America.
“I have this nature—I don’t expect a lot from people,” Firas said. “Not betrayed, no, not disappointed. I can never blame the Americans alone. It’s the Iraqis who destroyed their country, with the help of the Americans, under the American eye.” I was about to say that he deserved better, but Firas was lost in thought. “To this moment,” he said, “I dream about America.” ♦
Source: http://www.newyorker.com