Lateral thinking to combat lack of interpreters
The chronic shortage of battlefield interpreters and translators in the US Armed Forces has been an ongoing and hard to solve problem for some time, with languages such as Arabic, Pashto, Dari, Persian, Farsi, Hindi…and surprisingly Indonesian and Tagalog being particularly sought after.
Although efforts have been made to encourage capable soldiers to take up the study of these languages by enrolling in specialist courses, progress has been slow as it naturally takes some while to become proficient in these languages.
When a volunteer does enrol in a language course, they are sent to the Defence Language Institute in Monterrey, California, to undergo intensive courses of training at various levels of proficiency. But although, for instance enrolments for Arabic language training has doubled to more than 1200 students per course in the last seven years and enrolments for Farsi have trebled to over 300 in the same timeframe, this is still proving inadequate to meet requirements.
Recently though, in an inspired use of lateral thinking, the US Army has realised that it is much easier to train native speakers to be soldiers, than to train soldiers to be proficient in complex languages and so they have embarked on a recruitment campaign to enlist native language speakers in ‘ethnic pockets’ around the US.
Of particular interest are native ‘heritage’ speakers who gained their fluency in the natural setting of their family environment from parents and other relatives, many of whom are now US Citizens.
I’m sure that Edward de Bono would be proud of this laterally thought out stratagem.