Translator: Ksenia Belyakova Reviewer: Ellen Maloney
Hi, I am Major Adam Karr,
and I want to talk to you this afternoon about translation and war,
and I'm going to try to convince you to think about translation and war,
and particularly how we employ our terps
in terms otherwise than a function of accuracy, or instrumentality
and rather as a process by which we achieve a shared understanding
with our target audience and then perhaps, more importantly, our interpreters.
So I'm going to start with a quick made-up combat hypothetical.
Imagine November 2004, Fallujah, Iraq, that's the Second Battle of Fallujah.
Marines are fighting block to block, and one fire team of Marines prepares
to clear a home, that's suspected of being a staging point for insurgent attacks.
They enter violently, the lead marine kicks in the door, three others follow,
they clear the foyer, enter the living room,
and in the living room they encounter a very scared unarmed man.
The team leader points his rifle at the man, crouches up against the wall,
and he asks through his terp, "Is there anybody else in the home,
and, do they have any weapons?"
Right behind the closed door to the next room
is the man's 16-year-old son.
He's about to enter to see what's going on.
When he opens that door, a young marine will point their rifle
and make a split second shoot or no-shoot decision.
That decision will be based in large part on the answers
to that team leader's questions, which of course, relies entirely
on the interpreter.
Now, I offer that hypothetical because it's emblematic of the way
that we, as military officers often think about translation and terps, and war.
They are like an enabler.
They are similar to the hand mics on our radios,
we input the message, it travels to a secure frequency,
and then comes out of another hand mic, we don't question the authenticity
of the message we receive through the hand mic.
We don't understand Arabic any more than we understand the secure frequencies
that supposedly carried the message through our hand mic, right?
That's not to say it's all generally transparent to us,
and that's not to say we're naive,
we often catch interpreters maliciously manipulating language,
but even when we catch them we think of it in one of two ways:
either one, it's a capability loss,
the interpreter's not good enough at English or host nation language,
so they are incapable of performing their combat function, enabler function,
or two, we think of it in terms of loyalty, that they are deliberately
manipulating the language to some end.
It's important to note, and I'll get to this later, that we rarely
evaluate ourselves as the originator of the message when considering
why it came out on the other end of that transmission so poorly.
Now, in terms of my combat hypothetical,
thinking about a translator in this very instrumental way
is absolutely fine, it's a rapid exchange of discreet information,
and you're looking for a binary response.
You're looking for yes or no.
And language geeks like me can have a lot of fun
nitpicking the way the translator could even take that apart,
he might not say weapon, he might say rifle, he might say gun,
he might say anything else, a Kalashnikov.
He might not say, "Is there anybody in the house?",
he might say, "Are there any men in the house?"
because he's been culturally raised not to directly reference women.
Those are all benign variances.
The marines will get the information they need
to make the right decision when they need to make that decision.
But your interactions in Iraq and Afghanistan
will rarely be that clean, rarely be that rapid, rarely be that clear.
You'll be talking to local political officials,
local security officials, village elders, tribal elders,
merchants, contractors, you name it.
And those exchanges are going to resemble political negotiations
much more than they resemble rapid exchanges of information
under direct fire or in combat circumstances.
And then those minor variances that, you know, geeks like me might talk about
in translation, become very, very severe in terms of their implications.
And so I want to move on to talk about what happens in those instances.
So I want to back up and talk about what exactly is language.
So this scholar, Lawrence Venuti, he calls it "chain of signifiers."
Now, signifiers, because words represent, always imperfectly,
some concept, idea, or thing.
And it's a chain, because we put them in a sequence.
Those who have been through the rigor of our English department
understand what happens when you disrupt that sequence, you get red ink.
Ultimately, you break the message if you break the chain.
He then goes to discuss signifiers and the relativity of them.
He uses very big words to describe this, but ultimately it comes down to the idea
that what you perceive when you hear a specific word or concept
is based on a very complex confluence of factors, it has to do with upbringing,
it has to do with your experiences, your environment, your target audience,
the person who's telling it to you in the first place.
And like beautiful snowflakes,
the way that each person interprets each signifier
is individual to the person.
Now, what happens culturally,
and he defines this as shared values, beliefs, and experiences,
is you develop a shared understanding of those signifiers within a small group.
Cultures through their shared values, beliefs, and experiences
will start to identify the same, they will become homogenous
their interpretation of these signifiers.
You guys actually experience this all the time here at West Point.
You have developed your own little sublanguage group
that you're familiar with, even if you don't think about it.
So, if i said or if somebody in here said, "I have hours this weekend,"
you all know exactly what that means.
Not only do you know what it means literally,
but you're able to empathize because you understand
all the figurative implications, right?
It's regret for having done what you did, maybe frustration for having
lost your weekend, there's a whole series of interactions assumed in that term.
And in that one word you have a shared understanding
of that complex concept.
But when you call your friend from your hometown, or at another college
and say, "I can't take pass this weekend, I have hours,"
you're going to get a pretty confused response.
You're going to get, "You have hours to do what?"
They don't understand what you are talking about.
And you'll probably get "What's pass?" too,
as one student recently brought up to me.
Now, this is kind of a funny example of the relativity of language
but obviously, you can start to intuit how in more severe circumstances
this becomes a lot more important, and has very significant implications.
The easy example to always bring up is the word "democracy."
If you say democracy here at West Point, and you say it in most places in the US,
it's not like we think about democracy as the dictionary definition
or in sort of a Greco-Roman tradition,
we think about it in terms of our own lives, and what democracy means to us,
and it can connote something very specific.
But I would posit if you say the word 'democracy'
in Iraq or Afghanistan, or Syria, or Libya, or in the Ukraine,
you're going to get a very different response.
At best, you're going to get maybe an association with corrupt oligarchies,
and at worst, you will get, "Well, democracy to me means
you come in here with tanks and drive down my street
and rip down the wires for our electricity.
That's the last time somebody brought me democracy.
That's what I experienced."
And so the connotation is different.
You are going to understand it, if you are a patrol leader,
idealistically engaging a population and your main messaging theme is
"I'm here to bring you democracy,"
you might not be saying what you think you are saying.
You might lack that shared understanding with your audience.
So, with that more complex understanding of language I'm going to turn
to an excerpt from another novel to demonstrate this a bit better.
The novel is "Fives and Twenty-Fives" by author Michael Pitre,
and it follows a marine platoon through Iraq, the Sunni Triangle,
in the particularly tumultuous 2005–2007 years.
And in this scene the platoon has just stopped at a dilapidated farmhouse
along a dangerous highway, and they are investigating it.
Essentially, they've never been there before.
The scene is told from the perspective of one of the people there named Kateb
who actually speaks English, unbeknownst to the patrol and the interpreter there,
and that's whose voice we're hearing in it,
and in this case I've expurgated the obscenities in the text
because it does not contribute, but if something sounds off,
it might be because I changed a couple of words.
"Finished with their search, they sat them down on the log next to us
and called for the officer on the radio.
The officer, a black man with arm muscles that showed through his uniform,
approached with an interpreter at his side.
The fat interpreter, a Kuwaiti, judging by accent and his expensive watch
smirked at us.
"Good morning, I am Lt. Pederson," the officer said,
"Now look, sorry we have to search you like this.
The anti-Iraqi forces, the bad guys, they make it necessary.
Need to ask you a few questions, though.
Need to ask you what you are doing here. Who are you. All that stuff."
He points to his interpreter.
And in Arabic the interpreter says,
"This guy? Pederson? He's going to screw your whole world.
Tell him where you have the weapons hidden.
He's 50 Cent's cousin. I'm not lying."
Peterson continues in English:
"Now, do you have any weapons here? Any rifles? An RPG?
It's fine if you have a rifle, one Kalashnikov per household."
He points to the Kuwaiti, who again speaks in Arabic for him.
"You takfiri know about Abu Ghraib? This will be worse.
Tell Pederson where you keep the rockets or we will put you all in a naked pyramid
right over there, take pictures for the Internet, all over MySpace, tomorrow."
Remember, this is 2005. MySpace.
So I want to talk about Lt. Pederson's seemingly innocuous phrase,
"All that stuff."
He doesn't actually want the translator to literally translate "All that stuff,"
to him it functions as an 'et cetera.'
It stands in for a routine series of questions when a patrol
investigates a new sight.
Questions like: who are you, what are you doing here,
what are you selling, have you seen anybody suspicious,
do you have any weapons or contraband, has anybody asked you anything recently.
He and his soldiers have a shared understanding
of what those questions represent.
But unbeknownst to him, his interpreter either does not , best case, or,
worst case, of course is lying to him.
That one very simple phrase actually belies a very complex chain of signifiers.
See, Pederson's senior unit or several levels up has the mission
of creating stable democratic institutions in Iraq.
The unit below them determines to that end that they need to reduce
the violence to an extent that the citizens can engage
reasonably with their government without fear of retribution.
That eventually that chain of mission statements makes it down to Pederson,
and his job is to kill or expel malicious actors.
And to that end he's going to start to chart their travel patterns,
identify their bed-down points, etc.
And all that chain is wrapped up in this phrase, "All that stuff."
His soldiers all know that. The interpreter, likely, does not.
And more than just a chain of signifiers, that phrase actually is predicated
on a lot of cultural assumptions Pederson has about his mission.
Assumptions we all understand,
such as universal applicability of Western-style democracy,
the universal appeal of free-market capitalism,
certain philosophical assumptions about the relationships of citizens
to their government.
Pederson doesn't likely say those things all the time
but he absolutely operates under the assumption
that if he can reduce the violence in his area of operations enough,
the citizens will naturally gravitate towards those values.
And that's all wrapped up
in his initial questioning to create cooperation.
Now, when he says "All that stuff,"
he is asking his interpreter by namesake to interpret it,
and that's exactly what the interpreter did.
It seems in that little vignette that the interpreter is just
a flat malicious actor, a spoiled adolescent
taking advantage of helpless people
with a marine platoon behind him as muscle.
But Pederson asked him to interpret, and that's exactly what he did.
To us it seems like what Pederson is doing is clear, he is trying to create
cooperation and establish a relationship.
He knows there's a lot of risk for the people he's talking to,
and doing that he knows that they know that they could face retribution
from violent actors, sectarian groups within the area
if they cooperate with him, he's trying to convince them
in their best interest to do so, that he can protect them,
that he has confidence in them, and they should as well,
they should take that risk for the betterment of the country
in the long-term.
It's a difficult proposition, but to us that seems
like a fairly clear proposition.
But to a Kuwaiti or Iraqi national, who has lived their entire life
under the specter of violence, whether it be from oppressive dictators,
or from American invasions,
or from the sectarian violence they're experiencing,
that proposition is not so clear.
They're not on the same page as Pederson, and certainly not his interpreter.
So, what the interpreter has done is take Pederson's message and conform it
to the shared understanding that he thinks he can achieve with his audience.
And that understanding is, of course, a threat.
And he is not wrong to assume that these people in a dilapidated farmhouse
on a side of a dangerous highway in the Sunni Triangle of Iraq in 2006
don't exactly have a frame of reference for what it means to create stable,
lasting, democratic institutions,
and have no concept of what Pederson's counterinsurgency strategy is.
So, instead of try to engage a concept he knows or assumes his audience
will not understand, he has resorted to something more intelligible
to the audience.
And he can be fairly sure that his audience knows about Abu Ghraib
and what happened there.
He can also be fairly sure that they know who 50 Cent is,
and that they can relate to that representation of American culture
and power.
He's conformed the understanding Pederson had with what he was trying to communicate
to the understanding he expects that his audience will be able to communicate.
Now, I'm not trying to apologize for the interpreter.
Another scholar, David Damrosch, said,
"Amidst all the abstraction and relativity associated with language,
there's such thing as just a good and a bad translation."
This fat Kuwaiti, his translation. I would characterize as bad
but rather I want you to think about this process of translation
again, not in terms of accuracy or its functionality,
but this process of creating a shared understanding
and then, understanding the cultural and linguistic forces
that operate at the site of translation.
Pederson was trying to communicate something profound behind, "All that."
It's about trust and cooperation in a very complex environment.
And with that in mind, an accurate translation
might not have been an effective translation,
an accurate translation would mean you'd literally translate the phrase
"All that stuff," and that's not at all what Pederson was trying to say.
When we consider what makes a good or a bad translation,
or what it means to achieve a shared understanding,
it's obviously important that we understand
what the cultural and linguistic forces are that ultimately form what it is
that our understanding is, and there's a couple of practical benefits,
and there's a couple of abstract ones,
if it's practical ones, or of course, don't use idioms.
Don't say things like. "All that stuff,"
to a translator not on the same page as you,
and hopefully you'll learn that over and over from smart officers
as you get trained.
Also, question your own message, and look at the audience for the reaction.
If you're communicating trust and what you get in response is fear,
then it might be time to revisit this idea of shared understanding.
The last thing I would tell you is, challenge the assumptions
that are inherent, that maybe you haven't thought about in a while
in your language: you may notice your audience does not share
these assumptions.
I'd leave you with a hypothetical, though.
If in that dilapidated farmhouse they were harboring weapons,
specifically for an insurgent group, but once the fat Kuwaiti threatened
to put them in a naked pyramid and post it on the Internet,
they were like, "I'm giving up those weapons,"
did that just become a great translation?
If you have an answer to that, please let me know.
I've been laboring over it.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)