Meeting the Language Challenges of NATO Operations

Policy, Practice and Professionalization

I. Jones, Kenneth A. Loparo

• Editorial: Palgrave Macmillan
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137312563
• Categoría: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoría: Translating & Interpreting

After 40 years of Cold War, NATO found itself intervening in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and Afghanistan, where the ability to communicate with local people was essential to the success of the missions. This book explains how the Alliance responded to this challenge so as to ensure that the missions did not fail through lack of understanding.

1

NATO Linguistic Services 1949–1994

In order to fully understand the way in which any language policy is formulated, it is necessary to consider the wider context in which decisions are made about language use. NATO’s language policy has developed in line with the needs of the organization and can be traced from the adoption of the two official languages of English and French to the final promulgation of a doctrine on linguistic support for operations in 2011. This chapter looks at the way in which the provision of linguistic services was organized at headquarters level in the first phase of NATO’s development, from its establishment to the end of the Cold War. In this phase, the provision of interpretation and translation was largely focused on the need to facilitate internal communication in the two official languages. It is only at the end of this period, as the external political situation changes, that we see the emerging need for NATO to also have translation and interpretation capability in other languages.

NATO’s linguistic services were also influenced by global advances in the professionalization of translation and interpretation after the Second World War and came to be run according to the professional standards expected of the linguistic services of an international organization. This chapter explains how such a service is run and outlines the high standards expected of NATO translators and interpreters. This forms the backdrop to the discussion in subsequent chapters of linguistic services organized in the very different environment of peace support operations and gives the reader an appreciation of the kind of linguistic services Ian Jones wanted to establish in his plans for the peace support operations.

Finally this chapter introduces Ian Jones, providing a glimpse of his career and experiences as a NATO linguist from the time he first joined the organization to his becoming the chief of the SHAPE Linguistic Service. It is written from his perspective and incorporates his thoughts and opinions on the way in which linguistic services should be run and shaped.

The establishment of NATO

After the Second World War, which ended in Europe in May 1945, the Western European countries, together with Canada and the United States, became increasingly concerned about the policies of the USSR; unlike the Western Allies, it did not disarm and demobilize its armed forces. It did not respect the sovereignty or democratic institutions of the countries that it had occupied in Central and Eastern Europe and began to impose repressive regimes modelled on its own institutions.¹ The maintenance of large Soviet forces on the borders of Western Europe and such events as the blockade of Berlin in April 1948 and the coup in Czechoslovakia in June of the same year served to reinforce the disquiet felt in the West.

A small group of Western European powers (Belgium, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom) had already signed the Brussels Treaty in March 1948 to develop a common defence system and to create ties that would enable them to better resist the political and military threats to their security, including any return of militarism in defeated Germany. That treaty created the Western European Defence Organization. This step was soon followed in April 1949 by the signature in Washington of the North Atlantic Treaty, leading to the creation of NATO. In addition to the Brussels Treaty nations, NATO included at its outset the United States and Canada, as well as Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Norway and Portugal. Over the following decades, other nations joined, beginning with Greece and Turkey in 1952 and the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955. Spain joined in 1982 following the re-establishment of democracy in that country. Since the demise of the Soviet hegemony in Central and Eastern Europe and the disappearance of communist-style regimes, many other states have joined so that NATO now has 28 members, the newest members at the time of writing being Albania and Croatia since 2009.

NATO is a family of organizations,² rather than a monolithic entity. It is divided into a civilian and a military structure plus a range of specialized agencies and organizations. The civilian structure is headed by the secretariat of the North Atlantic Council (NAC): the International Staff, which supports the NAC and many of the committees which prepare its decisions. It is currently located at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium.

The military structure is headed by the International Military Staff which acts as the executive body for the NATO Military Committee (MC). The MC reports to the Council, advising on military issues. At the same time, it develops NATO’s military policies and doctrines while providing guidance to the NATO Commanders.

When Ian Jones joined NATO early in 1976, the military structure comprised three Major NATO Commands responsible for different geographical areas,³ but in 2003, the NATO military command structure was reorganized into two main entities, known as ‘strategic commands’, based on their functional responsibilities rather than geographical areas. They are:

• Allied Command Operations (ACO), with its headquarters at SHAPE, formerly the headquarters of Allied Command Europe;
• Allied Command Transformation (ACT), with its headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia.

Both of those strategic commands have subordinate bodies located in various member countries of the Alliance.

Finally, NATO also includes a number of specialized organizations and agencies dealing with areas such as logistic support, standardization, system programmes, project management, education and training. These bodies are located throughout the Alliance.

Providing translation and interpretation in the two official languages

The governing body of NATO is the NAC on which each member state is represented. Decisions are made by consensus: there is no majority voting and any member can veto a decision at any time. At its very first meeting in September 1949, the Council agreed that ‘English and French shall be the official languages for the entire North Atlantic Treaty Organization’.⁴ That decision was reaffirmed by the Council in May 1951.⁵ Further clarifications on the use of the two languages were issued in 1969 by Secretary General Manlio Brosio who ruled that ‘all NATO documents in those series which are issued to delegations are to be issued simultaneously in the two working languages of the Organization’.⁶ That policy was also interpreted in a note from the NATO Legal Advisor to apply to the spoken languages to be used at meetings, ‘… members of the Council and their representatives both in the Council and in the committees may speak in French and English, as the speaker prefers, and their words are to be immediately interpreted into the other language…’⁷ All NATO members are thus required to communicate with the organization in English or French and to receive communications in one or both of those languages (as they choose). They cannot demand that NATO translate or interpret into another language.

Whenever an organization uses more than one language, it is necessary to translate or interpret between those languages. Accordingly, as the various NATO bodies, agencies and organizations were set up, they began to employ linguists to translate or interpret between the two official languages. In addition, it was found useful to provide translation or interpretation from and to certain other languages, for example the languages of non-English or French-speaking countries where NATO bodies were located, such as German, Italian or Turkish. This was done for practical reasons to facilitate relations with local authorities and businesses, as well as local employees whose conditions of employment were governed by national law. Those languages did not thereby acquire official status for the Alliance and communications with central government authorities continued to take place in English or French.

Here it is necessary to explain the difference between translation and interpretation. In the simplest terms, the former is the written expression of the meaning of a text in another language, while the latter is the oral expression of the meaning of speech in another language. There is sometimes controversy among professional linguists as to whether translation and interpretation are two separate professions or two aspects of the same trade. The authors incline towards the view that they are both fundamentally the same in that they transpose meaning from one language to another but require different skills and abilities. At NATO, as in other international organizations, a linguist normally specializes in either translation or interpretation. We use the word ‘linguist’ throughout this book as a generic term to denote anyone who translates, revises or interprets, or combines any of these functions.

In the NATO peacetime structure (that is, its ‘permanent’⁸ headquarters and organizations as opposed to entities set up to deal with particular situations like the peacekeeping operations in the Balkans or the intervention in Afghanistan), the vast majority of linguists are civilians. NATO civilians, with the exception of linguists, are placed in one of three grade categories: ‘A-grades’ for managerial and professional staff; ‘B-grades’ for technical or clerical employees; and ‘C-grades’ for manual and certain other lower-skilled workers.

Linguists are placed in a special category called ‘L-grades’. There are five L-grades, running from a trainee grade (L-1) to the head of a significant Linguistic Service (L-5). The NATO system distinguishes between translators and interpreters by adding an additional letter (LT or LI) to indicate whether a post covers translation or interpretation.⁹ Nevertheless in a number of NATO’s permanent bodies, linguists are required to work as both translators and interpreters. This is also the case in the peace support operations such as those in the Balkans and Afghanistan.

The reason why linguists are in a special category is that, as in all organizations, a grade is assigned to a post on the basis of the precise duties and the amount of responsibility that the incumbent has. These in turn drive the level of qualifications required to perform the tasks. In one sense it may be said that linguists generally have very little responsibility given that they ‘merely’ translate or interpret the words of others. For the most part, they do not themselves take major decisions, direct large teams or manage significant budgets. On the other hand, they require a high level of qualifications and skills. To prevent linguists from being placed in the ‘B’ category, which would have caused recruitment and retention difficulties, a separate category was set up for them. Their grades are considered to be equivalent to the corresponding A grades, although certain other aspects are not identical, for example, their salaries.

In the military structure, both A and L graded civilian posts are considered to be ‘officer’ grades. An A-2 or LT-2 for example, is equivalent to an ‘OF-2’, that is, a captain in the Army, while the highest linguist grade (L-5) is equivalent to a colonel. However, linguist positions are generally not filled by military personnel and there are various reasons for this. The first is that working as a linguist has generally not been a recognized career path for military personnel in most armed forces. Attending lengthy courses to learn a language can even be detrimental to an officer’s or NCO’s career as he or she may miss out on other postings that will lead to promotion. Another problem is that even if military personnel have language capabilities, they might not be in the languages required in the military structure or for particular operations. In recent times though, there has nevertheless been recognition, for example in the US armed forces, that foreign language learning is not a luxury, following incidents such as the attack on the twin towers in New York and the interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere (Brecht and Rivers, 2012). The lessons learned show that too much reliance had been placed on electronic intelligence or satellite surveillance and too little on old-fashioned human intelligence. Even if communications are intercepted, it is still necessary to understand them.

A further problem with employing military linguists is the limited amount of time, generally three years, that a member of a nation’s military personnel is assigned to a NATO posting. It often takes about two years for a newly recruited linguist to become fully familiarized with the subjects dealt with in NATO and their terminology. Military linguists in the command structure, even if they had the necessary language combinations, would not remain in post long enough to acquire the experience needed to work effectively. Senior linguists such as revisors generally need ten years’ experience or more. The nations’ armed forces already struggle to fill every NATO military post in the peacetime structure, a situation that is not helped by commitments to ongoing operations and reductions in personnel. For these reasons therefore, linguistic posts are almost always filled by civilians.

Ian Jones: While I was at SHAPE, I experienced at one time attempts to ‘militarize’ civilian posts as they were deemed to be too costly. Such endeavours tended to fail as the nations were faced with shortages of military personnel and furthermore did not have military personnel with the required qualifications. That then led to the ‘civilianization’ of those posts. There were no attempts to militarize linguistic positions.

Special rules and procedures are followed for the recruitment of linguists as opposed to other categories of civilian personnel in the military structure. Normally, with certain exceptions, each headquarters is responsible for the selection and recruitment of its personnel: there is no centralized recruitment service. However within ACO, all qualified candidates for linguistic posts, irrespective of the employing headquarters, must be tested by the SHAPE Linguistic Service and the head of that service must be a member of the relevant selection board. I was told when I joined SHAPE in 1989 that those procedures had been put in place to prevent the recurrence of certain dubious decisions taken by individual HQs to recruit linguists who had subsequently been found not to be capable of performing their duties to the required standard. The selection boards for those posts had sometimes not included a single linguist and candidates had not been tested to professional standards. In fact, the first time it was necessary to recruit for a vacant post at SHAPE itself after my arrival, I found that I had not been appointed as a board member and had to insist that I be included.

When selecting candidates for linguistic posts, as for most other jobs, the first step is to assess their academic qualifications and experience. However academic qualifications are not necessarily an accurate indicator of linguistic competence and it is sometimes very difficult to judge the relevance or even the reality of experience claimed by applicants for jobs. Whereas some of the abilities required by a good linguist can be learnt, to a large extent they are a gift. This may be likened to someone who wishes to be a musician: they may practise for years without ever achieving the level required to play a Beethoven concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic! Thus not even the length of experience is necessarily a reliable indicator of ability. Candidates are therefore rigorously tested in translation, revision and/or interpretation as required. Those who do not meet minimum standards are rejected. The results of the tests are the main factor taken into account when making the final selection.

Each linguistic service is organized differently depending on its size. In some bodies there is a single linguist, whereas NATO International Staff in Brussels employs approximately 100 translators, interpreters and revisors. There is of course an important difference between translation and interpretation: translations can be subjected to quality control before they are issued, whereas an interpreter’s words are spoken directly to listeners. In the area of translation, to ensure that the right level of quality is maintained, translations are often reviewed and corrected before issue. This process is known as revision. It is performed by experienced linguists, known as revisors, who check translated texts and make any corrections required to their style and substance. Interpretation cannot of course be corrected in this manner.

The larger translation or linguistic services therefore employ revisors as well as translators. It is generally reckoned that a revisor can cope with the output of two or three experienced translators. For example, when I became the head of the SHAPE Linguistic Service in 1989, it included six French-speaking translators and two revisors checking their work. Such services may also employ support staff to perform proofreading (not to be confused with revision), typing and clerical duties. Finally some services employ qualified linguists or ‘linguistic assistants’ to provide terminological or documentation support for translators.

Ideally, professional translators should only translate into their mother tongues. A ‘mother tongue’ (also called ‘native language’) is a language that you are brought up to speak from earliest childhood, before attendin...