Translation Capacity Still Spotty After 9/11

WASHINGTON — Scores of translators of Arabic and other languages have been hired by the government since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to decode intelligence, help interrogate prisoners and testify in court.

Some of those hires have turned out better than others.

A prosecution in New York unraveled after the government admitted that key evidence -- a document that supposedly described one of the defendants as a senior terrorist leader -- had been incorrectly translated by an Army language specialist.

A prosecutor in Detroit, unable to find a linguist through the FBI, found someone else to prepare a summary of more than 100 audiotapes used in a terrorism trial. The translator turned out to be a federal informant with a history of drug dealing -- and to have terrorist ties.

And translators at the military prison for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been prosecuted for crimes, including mishandling sensitive documents. Now some of the translation work done for military tribunals at the prison is being reviewed for evidence that it might have been slanted to favor prosecutors.

These and other snafus reflect a quandary for the intelligence community: Despite a crash program since the Sept. 11 attacks, the effort to improve the nation’s slim capacity to translate Arabic has achieved only modest results.

By some measures, the government is actually losing ground, because the volume of intelligence that the government sweeps up every day has increased sharply.

The inspector general of the Justice Department last year estimated that the number of terrorism-related documents needing translation had increased sevenfold in the first two years after the attacks.

That did not count tens of thousands of hours of audio recordings -- or such esoterica as graffiti of interest to investigators on a piece of plastic plumbing.

The FBI has been scrambling to recruit more translators, and has increased the number on its staff by about 60%, including many who speak Arabic. Nonetheless, it does not even pretend to be able to translate all the material it receives.

“It’s like drinking water from a fire hose,” said Kevin Hendzel, a government language contractor and official with the American Translators Assn.

Often, officials must resort to the priority-setting techniques used by emergency-room physicians, performing linguistic triage to determine which documents to translate and which to set aside for future attention.

The problem is that it is much harder for anti-terrorism officials to know which documents can be safely set aside untranslated than it is for doctors to decide which patients can safely be made to wait.

Some experts say that it could take a decade or more before there are enough translators to meet demand, in part because the languages of Islamic terrorist groups -- including dozens of regional dialects -- are so hard to master.

The FBI has received thousands of applications for language positions since Sept. 11, 2001, but 75% of the applicants fail the FBI’s basic entry exam. The best translators are native speakers, but they often have trouble obtaining security clearances.

One effort to plug the language gap is underway in a warren of classified offices next to a Starbucks in downtown Washington.

The National Virtual Translation Center was established by the USA Patriot Act and began operating two years ago. Its main clients: the nation’s 15 intelligence agencies.

Instead of trying to assemble large teams of translators in one place, the operation is building a team of experts who are geographically scattered but tied together by a computer network. The goal is to complement the cadre of translators working in offices of the FBI, the CIA and other such organizations.

The translation center is also testing new technologies aimed at speeding the process of sorting through the flood of intelligence.

The operation currently draws on a network of about 100 translators who speak 40 languages, including Urdu, Pashto, Dari and various Arabic dialects. Most are helping fight the war on terrorism from their homes or offices. The center is hiring one expert who lives on a boat near San Francisco.

On a recent afternoon, a group of employees tested speech recognition and automated translation software that instantly converted to English a broadcast from an Arabic television station. A search function allowed the team to pinpoint words of special interest -- such as bomb.

In other offices, task managers e-mail translation assignments to members of the network. On one recent day, they were seeking an expert in Farsi with an understanding of missile technology who could dissect a technical paper picked up during an engineering conference.

The office prepared a basic language primer for members of the military helping with recovery efforts in South Asia after the tsunami disaster. And it analyzed intelligence from Iraq in a case that one official said saved lives of kidnap victims and troops.

Elsewhere, a retired Lebanese-born soft-drink executive pored over intelligence in a secure room where the clock on the wall tracked the time in Baghdad. He is one of the center’s few translators who work in the office.

The man, who spent his life in the Middle East before civil war drove him and his family to America, is considered a major resource. He is now studying terrorist training manuals, after enduring a security check that he says took 16 months to complete.

“Our job is to have knowledge of more language resources than anybody else,” said Everette Jordan, an Altadena native and former National Security Agency linguist who heads the center. “Essentially, if you have some bad guys, whatever language they are speaking, it is our job to track someone down and find someone who understands it.”

On a wall in his office is a map of the United States with dozens of color-coded pins, identifying secure locations where his translators can go to review classified material.

Such efforts are an adjunct to the main task, which is getting more translators on the job in the intelligence agencies themselves.

The FBI employs about 1,300 translators, compared with about 800 before the Sept. 11 attacks. It is asking Congress for about 300 more. About 160 of the hires are Arabic speakers. But the limits to ramping up quickly extend beyond the difficulty of the languages and passing security checks.

The final report of the bipartisan Sept. 11 commission found that there were six graduates of Arabic language programs in the United States the year after the attacks. Interest has boomed since then, with undergraduate enrollments in Arabic language courses now in the thousands. But it remains to be seen how many will stay long enough to gain advanced proficiency, and if they do, whether they will want to work for the government.

Although officials say they have made progress, members of Congress and others remain concerned. The Senate Judiciary Committee is planning hearings on the FBI program.

It is difficult to gauge the progress, in part because much of the work remains cloaked in secrecy.

In its report last year, the Justice Department inspector general said that the FBI had a backlog of more than 120,000 hours of untranslated audiotape in languages such as Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto -- about 20% of the total collected. It concluded: “The FBI’s collection of material requiring translation has continued to outpace its translation capabilities.”

FBI officials said the report painted an overly bleak picture. They said that most of the material that was not reviewed did not represent an imminent threat.

“We fully expect to review all of our work in counterterrorism cases,” said Margaret Gulotta, chief of the FBI Language Services Section.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller said in March that bureau translators had reviewed more than 500,000 hours of audiotape and 1.9 million pages of documents in counterterrorism and counterintelligence cases last year. But the bureau declined to say how many hours or pages were collected.

The fledgling translation center is likely to play a growing support role for the FBI, CIA and other agencies.

In January, the center completed perhaps its most significant assignment to date, a six-month job for the Pentagon checking the accuracy of translations of statements that detainees in Cuba made to military tribunals looking into the lawfulness of their imprisonment.

The closed-door proceedings have been criticized by lawyers for the detainees as being rife with the possibility of abuse, including attempts by translators employed by Pentagon contractors to interpret statements by detainees in ways that favor the government.

A Pentagon spokesman, declining to comment on any problems the review may have turned up, described the work as “quality assurance and quality control translation work.”

Jordan said the assignment showed that the center was being taken seriously as an independent and “trusted outside source,” and illustrated the crucial role that language experts performed these days.

“We are not the keys to the kingdom,” he said, “but we are on the key ring, and we do play a role.”