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)
