🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <63663@cup.portal.com> Christopher_C_Lapp@cup.portal.com writes:
>I noticed a full page advertisement recruiting for the National
>security agency in the American Translators Association bulletin.
>Why would the NSA want language types?  I thought they did alot
>number-crunching and your average translator has had little or
>no math background.  Also, don't they have a whole much of
>Defense Language School types who have been drilled in every 
>language imaginable?

I suspect that messages sent between (say) the Saudi Arabian Oil
Ministry and it's London office, might well be in languages other
than US Standard English...

More seriously, James Bamford "The Puzzle Palace" (Houghton Mifflin,
1982 / Penguin, 1983; ISBN 0-14-006748-5) quotes "A former [UK GCHQ]
A Group voice-processing specialist" as saying

	"You operate primarily on key words, because
	 there is no way that in a year [of Russian
	 language school] you are going to comprehend
	 the language well enough to understand what's
	 going on.  They've had second-generation
	 people who have had a hard time because some
	 people slur, and there is geographical variance,
	 so they expect a non-native to just operate
	 on the key words -- when you hear the word
	 missle, for example."

In other words, governmental crypto agancies need a lot of linguists,
and at least some of these have to be pretty good.  Thus the ATA ad.

(Of course, the *ideal* person might have a lot of linguistics *and*
a lot of group theory and other relevant math *and* a hefty dose of
high-performance computer expertise.  Such people are probably rather
hard to find, though...)

- Jonathan Thornburg
  <jonathan@einstein.ph.utexas.edu> or <jonathan@hermes.chpc.utexas.edu>
  University of Texas at Austin / Physics Dept / Center for Relativity
  and (for a few more months) U of British Columbia / {Astronomy,Physics}