Thoughts On Translation

Here is an interesting article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on IBM’s new English>Arabic translation software and hardware, with an interesting comment from ATA public relations guru Kevin Hendzel. I actually found the most disturbing part of the article to be the statistic that of 1,000 employees at the newly constructed U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, only 33 speak Arabic and only 6 of those are fluent. Here’s a thought: what about allocating some of the $75 million that the Pentagon spent on translation research last year for foreign language education? Just a thought!