Well, the connections are subtle, but they're there. I've discovered that the status of the translator underwent a profound shift in the 1700s. Translation became divorced from and deemed inferior to “original” work. At some point in the 1770s, The Gentleman's Magazine , a very conservative literary journal, lamented the common perception of the “drudgery of translation.” They were nostalgic for the days of Pope, when the translator and the poet were considered non-differentiated species. Things had changed, and translation had become “drudgery,” hard work.

We live with the legacy of that historical change. Translation today seems to be considered a craft, not an art. One can fantasize today about a world in which the work of translation has been taken over completely by automation, just like other forms of manual labor could be accomplished by robots on an assembly line. Of course, programming a machine translator has proven to be more complex than programming a robot to perform a finite number of manual tasks. The differences between languages are too complex, and we don't know enough about the deep structures of languages to make a machine translator that will allow for the subtleties of syntax and semantics to be transferred from one language to another.

The machines that we currently use—people—have some rather imperfect properties. But I'm not so much interested in the mistakes human translators make: they are imperfect, but they do a much better job than machine translators. I'm more interested in the fact that translators are fallible—and I use the word “fallible” in a positive sense, especially when it comes to the war on terror—simply because they have this other language operating inside them. The real problem for the Americans and the British in their current war is that they have to rely on these translators for information about the enemy.

How do you mean?

For example, the military are very suspicious about people who speak Arabic, not to mention Pashtu and Dari. A native Arabic speaker is almost from the beginning excluded from consideration as a translator for the military, since, according to military preconceptions, Arabic speakers might be sympathetic to, well, the Arabs. There's a profound catch-22 here: there are plenty of Arabic speakers who could offer skills in Arabic- English translation, but the military can't—or won't—use them since they are potentially seditious. So the military trains its own translators. And you can't just teach someone language fluency in a few months. Apparently, the FBI, for example, has some 8000 hours of untranslated messages they've intercepted. In order to train translators well, however, you have to have them learn with native speakers. Again, you're caught in the same trap. Sending off a translator to learn Arabic with Arabs, you risk them becoming “infected” by that foreign language and foreign perspective. And more than likely, if you send them off to learn Arabic in an Arab land, they will meet up with people whose viewpoints don't dovetail so well with American and British foreign policy.

So what's the alternative?

Well, besides developing perfect translation machines, which may be well-nigh impossible, there is no alternative. You have to trust that the translators—or “linguists,” as the military calls them—have been indoctrinated sufficiently in their early training not to allow the “enemy” to infect their thinking too much.

And does this work?

Imperfectly. There are no doubt plenty of instances where it does work. I'm interested in cases that don't: the whistleblowers. There are a growing number of cases in which translators don't play the role of the mindless machine translator and think for themselves. There are few things more dangerous to the military than translators who think for themselves. There are numerous safeguards drawn into the system to offset the possibility of the whistle-blowing translator, but they occur.

Sibel Edwards is the most famous one. She is the translator who exposed that American intelligence had direct knowledge of a threat to use airplanes as missiles previous to 9/11. She knows that because she translated them. She's actually under a gag order from the Administration right now, even though her testimony to the 9/11 Commission was, briefly, a public matter. A British translator Katharine Gun was arrested for leaking information about the telephone tapping of UN Security Council representatives by the American National Security Agency with the cooperation of British Intelligence. I believe Patrick Radden Keefe discusses her story in his book on wiretapping—I forget the name.*

Erik Saar is an interesting case. He worked as a linguist at Gitmo** and wrote a book on his experiences. Intriguing about Inside the Wire —besides the gruesome descriptions of the interrogations that have occurred there—is the road Saar traveled in becoming a military translator. In order to learn Arabic to a sufficient degree, he had to be exposed to native speakers of Arabic. These people taught him a lot about Arab culture, Islam, and many of the beefs Arabs have about American foreign policy in the Middle East.

*The book is Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping. —JE

**Gitmo. Members of the American military and others refer to Guantánamo Bay, the American detention center on the island of Cuba, as “Gitmo.”— JE

You mean that he didn't simply believe the Administration's line that they “hate us for our freedoms” ?

Right. He may not have accepted everything they believe in—he makes it clear he doesn't—but at least he was privy to first-hand testimony of the Other. From a military standpoint, I'm sure that made him an infected agent. Just as importantly, he documents the way the military attempts to curtail the free-thinking of their linguists. Military translators must follow three dicta: 1) never question the interrogator; 2) always mimic the interrogator; and 3) always translate word for word and never add anything else. In such a scenario, the translator becomes pure automaton, mindlessly performing his or her given task.

For these reasons, the military would like to dispense with the need for human translators all together.

Which you say is impossible?

It's a highly problematic venture, but they're trying. DARPA* is currently working on a mega-project they call the GALE program. GALE stands for Global Autonomous Language Exploitation. Wow, that's a mouthful. You can read about it in a military online edition of the journal Military Information Technology , if you are interested. In fact, I was surprised to find that the website features prominently Jan Bruegal's Tower of Babel superimposed by Arabic words in both Roman and Arabic script. That same painting serves as the back cover for the Slovenian journal— Prevajanje Besedil iz Obdobja Romantike —which published my first article on translation and Romanticism, “Translation as Symptom: the ‘Sickness' of the Romantic.” That paper argues that some Romantic writers saw translation as a means for intervention into dominant modes of discourse, that the translator serves as a vehicle for subverting hegemonic structures.

*Defense Advanced Research Project Agency— JE

Do you find it ironic that the same iconic image of Bruegal's Tower of Babel is used for your own research and the military's?

Is that irony? I suppose it is.

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