MSNBC - Translation technology in the age of terrorAround the table are experts in Arabic, Russian, Chinese, and Italian, and a woman who is one of the government’s few speakers of Dari, a language used in Afghanistan. They are young; three are in their 20s, the others in their 30s and 40s. But they are increasingly vital to U.S. national security: they are the front-line translators analyzing language that is messy, complicated, and fragmented but may give clues to an impending terrorist attack.

BBC NEWSyours...A shortage of Arabic speakers has seen earnings for the best translators and interpreters reach £100,000 a year. Demand, driven by the War on Terror, is set to continue - but what lies in store for those offering their services?

General News: Language expert says native English speakers on decline: "Graddol says English is the second most-common native tongue in the world, trailing only Chinese. By the middle of the century, he thinks Chinese will continue its dominance, with Hindi-Urdu of India and Arabic climbing past English, and Spanish nearly equaling it."

Bowdoin Orient Opinion - Ambassador J.Lo?: "The war on terror is spurred by ideas, rather than conquest or riches. Both the radical Islamists and the United States have a message that they wish to spread. Terror is the method of communication for al- Qaeda and the jihadists. It is incumbent upon the United States to come up with an effective countermeasure. At times, this countermeasure is dropping food aid from B-52s even as bombs are being dropped in other places. Sometimes it is creating a cultural center in Riyadh and teaching English to children in Iraq."

The Washington Times

Trade Arabia

Doha-based Al Jazeera television is to launch its new English language channel in May, said a senior company official. Al Jazeera has signed a partnership agreement with NetAdvantage to facilitate and market online advertising.The launch of the English language channel will help the popular Arabic news media expand its reach among the region's non-Arab viewers.

Gulf News: At a recent three day conference in Abu Dhabi on women and Gulf families, Wajeeha Sadeq Al Bahreena, Chairperson of Bahrain's Women Society, drew attention to the rising prominence of English in the Arabian Gulf region at the expense of marginalising Arabic and undermining Islamic values. This is what she had to say:

Teenagers in the [Gulf Arab] region are steering away from their language and culture towards the West by using more English vocabulary, changing their clothes and hair styles to ape the US Marines and losing respect for parents. The use of Arabic vocabulary among our youth has become less while the use of English words has largely increased. Some of our young men even no longer know some Arabic words and need them to be translated into English. The American slang language has become widespread in the region. It has become a daily language among our youth. Our teenagers no longer say 'Salam-o-Alaikum' as they have replaced it with 'hi' or 'hello'. They even no longer shake hands to greet each other, replacing it with clapping or snapping fingers. Their eating habits have also altered as they now prefer fast food and no longer bother mentioning Allah Almighty (God) before or after eating.

As English language teachers, we cannot simply go on shrugging off comments like this; it's about time that the profession (in this region) started thinking hard about how our work is tied up in local/global politics and about the sorts of ideologies our work promotes.

Gulf News: : Many in the Muslim world are feeling the pressure of educational reform with English often being forced on private and government sector institutions. A common theme that has emerged in recent years is the absurd notion that English is supposedly a "language of moderation', a language that is somehow specially endowed to counter terrorist activity amidst the "war against terror", the facile logic being that more English means less Islamic militancy. Gulf News reports today on how English is playing that role in Pakistan:

Almost two years ago, President Pervez Musharraf announced an ambitious plan to wean the madrassahs away from extremism and force them to teach a broad, modern curriculum. The 10,000 colleges, serving 1.5 million students, were given until the end of 2002 to reform or close. Shah, who sits in Pakistan's National Assembly for the Jamaat-e-Ulema-Islam party, says this diet of religious devotion is balanced with English lessons. Yet none of his teachers speaks more than broken English. He also claims to offer computer lessons - on five computers between 1,000 pupils.

Al-Ahram Weekly published a previously published article today by Edward Said in which he touches on the sociocultural complexities of using Arabic in the modern world. One very interesting insight Said develops is the different approaches to 'eloquence' in Arabic and English:

Because Arabic and English are such different languages in the way they operate, and also because the ideal of eloquence in one language is not the same as in the other, a perfect bilingualism of the kind that I often dream about, and sometimes boldly think that I have almost achieved, is not really possible. There is a massive technical literature about bilingualism, but what I've seen of it simply cannot deal with the aspect of actually living in, as opposed to knowing, two languages from two different worlds and two different linguistic families. This isn't to say that one can't be somehow brilliant, as the Polish native Conrad was, in English, but the strangeness stays there forever. Besides, what does it mean to be perfectly, in a completely equal way, bilingual? Has anyone studied the ways in which each language creates barriers against other languages, just in case one might slip over into new territory?

It is well documented that the sociopolitical and socioeconomic dynamics around English help sustain class divisions particularly in postcolonial contexts. This appears to be very much the case in Bangladesh where English is very much the preserve of elites in the country. Today's article in the Daily Star reports on the "Language Martyrs" and a speech by Mamunur Rashid, who argues that

The elite class of the country are creating a problem by sending their children to the English medium schools where they are not taught to speak Bangla properly. Even an influential minister in the current cabinet can speak English fluently but again having a disgraceful Bangla pronunciation. But if we look at Japan or China, we find that they have no regrets of not knowing English properly and they love and honour their respective languages... all the ministers and the parliamentarians should attend language workshops to improve their mother-tongue

'At first I was unhappy with the U.S. forces. They stole 14 months of my life,' Agha said. 'But they gave me a good time in Cuba.' They were very nice to me, giving me English lessons.'

These are supposedly the words of a former detainee at Camp Delta X. What is utterly bizarre about the way the media seems to be reporting the 14 year old boy's release is that his ordeal wasn't so bad after all because he was taught English. The point the media seems to be making here is that his experience at Camp Delta X amounts to a full immersion ESL programme which will now make him more marketable than his Afghan peers in the war torn economy of Afghanistan. Who knows he may even end up speaking English with a better American accent than Hamid Karzai? The fact that an innocent 12 year old was captured, illegally detained for one and a half tears without trial or access to legal representation pales into insignificance.

Bernard Crick in an apologetic piece about Blunkett's ideas on English and immigration in today's Guardian writes

the present law on citizenship is bad. English is required in addition to five years' actual residence and no serious criminal record. But anyone can fill in the form and merely the word of a sponsor that the applicant speaks English is enough.

This sort of arrogance is quite remarkable especially when it's coming from a nation that has an apalling record of learning foreign languages. And as ever, I'm thinking of the thousands of British nationals living in Saudi Arabia and the neighbouring Gulf states who even after many years of having lived in an Arab country cannot bring themselves to formulate a single intelligible sentence in Arabic. It's about time Bernard Crick visited British immigrant communities in Italy, Spain, France, the Arabian Gulf etc before pontificating on how immigrants in the UK ought to go about learning English.

How utterly scandalous of the Michigan Democratic Party to translate ballots into Arabic! And not least a language that "we're" suposed to be at war with. That's pretty much the feelling you get of the tone from the US English website as yet again the forces of evil are working to further dilute the linguistic purity of US society. Rob Toonkel of the U.S. English is reported to have said:

It's a very dangerous move. It keeps people separate.

And they all lived happily ever after...