subject: Intelligence Community Translation [print this page] The U.S. government is the worlds largest employer of translators and interpreters. The intelligence agencies do not hire interpreters or translators specifically; instead, they hire "linguists," people who are highly proficient in two or more languages and ideally have some training or experience as a translator, interpreter, or both. The agencies then put them to work mostly as translators, but often the translation is from a spoken source.
The intelligence agencies hire linguists based on a set of criteria not publicly known. From a variety of sources I've assembled the following general picture, but it is incomplete and may be incorrect in places. Obviously, you have to be an American citizen, and the agencies strongly prefer born over naturalized citizens. You have to be in good physical and mental health, pass an extensive background check that will cover your entire life and include anything and everything you did inside and outside the U.S., you have to have been in the U.S. for most of the past five to ten years, you have to have "minimal foreign exposure" (meaning no regular trips to Beijing or Baghdad, no marriage to foreigners, no close friends from Iran or North Korea), and you have to pass a battery of psychological exams that supposedly use very advanced brain scanning equipment to detect deception. Beyond this you have to pass the language tests for your languages, and you have to accept the lifestyle changes required to work for these agencies: you have to inform them of any new contacts, submit for review anything you want to publish, receive approval for any international travel plans, and so forth. Of course the above requirements may be bent if the agency needs a language, but in general they hold.
Suffice to say that there will be blow-back from this, though we may never see specifically what it is. I would not want a medical student performing surgery on me or diagnosing a medical condition, nor would I want an undergraduate engineering student to design or program my next computer, car, or airplane I take. Training is important: it's the time to learn by trial and error It's not the time to use your partially developed skills to attempt to do what fully trained, experienced professionals get paid to do.
Translators go where the work is, and where the pay is better. In other words, they behave like any other "economic animal" would.
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