Tuesday, November 22, 2005

[POLITICS/WAR] Here's a business idea for all you budding entrepreneurs. The Army is woefully short on Arabic speakers. So is the Iraq war effort as a whole.. And I'm going to bet not too many American Arabic-speakers are anxious to sign onto the first-one's-free now-we've-got-you-now-we're-gonna-keep-you Army.

Someone ought to rassle up a bunch of indisputably patriotic Arabic-speakers and put together an overnight translation service. Fax or email us your documents, our guys read them during our day/your night, get'em back the next morning.

Or is someone already doing this? I hope?

It's a mystery to me that the Army doesn't insist on teaching all the soldiers Arabic. Sure, it's a hard language to learn and any language takes time. But if there's one thing the Army does extremely well, it's teach people stuff. And the soldiers aren't patrolling all the time. Be a good idea if our guys knew a little bit more than "Allahu akhbar."

Tags: Iraq; business; war

8:35 AM

2 Comments:

By training, I'm a linguist. Ever since I graduated back in the 90s, I've seen job posts for American-born arabic speakers and arabic linguists. There was a shortage before the recent war. One of the reasons is that the schools with Arabic programs are liberal bastions like Berkeley and Cornell, and no students from either of those schools is going to join the army.

But you would think they would have figured this one out by now.

By  Christina, at 9:24 AM  

HGere's something taht will boggle your mind... the Army has KICKED OUT at least 6 Arabic languages students/ speakers solely because they are gay.

How much sense does THAT make?

For those who think I could make this sh*t up...

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/11/15/MN57382.DTL
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29683-2003Dec2.html

By  writergurl, at 12:44 PM  

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