Addressing a gathering of university presidents attending a conference at the State Department on 5 January 2006, then-president George W. Bush spoke of the country's dire need for translators to shore up national security. He promised to spend $114 million to expand the teaching of so-called "critical languages" such as Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, and so forth at the university as well as K - 12 levels as part of a new federal program called the National Security Language Initiative. The president then illustrated the importance of learning such languages in the following way: "In order to convince people we care about them, we've got to understand their culture and show them we care about their culture. You know, when somebody comes to me and speaks Texan, I know they appreciate Texas culture. When somebody takes time to figure out how to speak Arabic, it means they're interested in somebody else's culture. . . . We need intelligence officers who when somebody says something in Arabic or Farsi or Urdu, know what they're talking about."
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Issue 101: Winter 2009
Translation, American English, and the National Insecurities of Empire
Abstract:
This essay inquires into the relationship between translation and empire in the United States. It argues that such a relationship cannot be understood apart from a critical appreciation of the Americanization, which is to say, translation of English from an imperial into a national language that required the reorganization of the nation's linguistic diversity into a hierarchy of languages resulting in the emergence of a monolingual hegemony. However, this American notion of translation as monolingual assimilation was always contested, and we can see its limits in the context of the recent U.S. occupation of Iraq. As an examination of the vexed position of Iraqi translators working for the U.S. military shows, attempts to deploy American notions of translation in war have devolved instead into the circulation of what in fact remains untranslatable and so unassimilable to U.S. imperialist projects.
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Social Text collective member José Muñoz will be among the presenters at this state of the field conference on performance, to be held July 8th - 10th, 2010, at the House of World Cultures in Berlin. Click here for the full conference program. >>
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Are you suggesting that Americans should speak a variety of languages, publish books in them, etc. and wouldn't that divide rather than bring Americans togoether. Wouldn't it be like a Tower of Babel. Wouldn't it increase the complexity and costs of educating people?
If you are referring to second languages, many of us do study a second language, usually French or Spanish, representing places we are most likely to vacation, but some students in the better high schools are being offered Chinese or Farsi. But it does require regular use of the language in order to remain fluent.
Certainly intelligence officers need some of the languages of our enemies, but I don't see how the rest of need to learn these languages.