September 11, untranslated

Denise Nahigian • 12 September 2025

Inadequate translation and national security

In the weeks September 11, 2001, I remember rumors that the U.S. government had advance intelligence about the planned attacks – documents and audio recorded conversations in Arabic – that simply hadn’t been translated. The official story is that there simply weren’t enough qualified Arabic-to-English translators with the necessary security clearance. Given that the pass rate for American Translators Association certification exams is well below 20%, and below 10% for Arabic to English, the “shortage of translators” justification seems regrettable but plausible. This 2012 piece from NPR explains the 9/11 situation succinctly: https://www.npr.org/2012/10/24/163533923/excerpt-found-in-translation

What I HADN’T heard was the allegation that certain supervisors at the FBI deliberately delayed the translation of documents in the months following the September 11 attacks, hoping the stack of unfinished work would motivate the government to provide more funds and hire additional translators. According to this 2003 episode of 60 Minutes, one supervisor went so far as to delete completed Turkish-to-English translations from an office computer in an effort to delay the work: https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/0311/attachment1.htm

The whistleblower was fired from the FBI and has documented her experiences in her autobiography, Classified Woman: The Sibel Edmonds Story. She went on to found the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.

Twenty-four years later, are we doing any better? I have no inside knowledge of government corruption. What I DO observe is that hostility toward biculturalism, immigration and even foreign students has increased, while ignorance of the complexities of human translation and interpreting has not improved; instead, it has evolved with the rise of artificial intelligence. Insisting on English and the American way will not generate the desperately needed next generation of human translators and interpreters, nor will it equip us to defend ourselves against threats who study us as we bask in imagined superiority. For all our breathtaking advances in technology, tightened security and increased paranoia, I feel that we have become weaker and even more vulnerable than in 2001. I would love to be wrong.

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When Ideals Met Reality: Civil Rights Act Title VI

by Denise Nahigian • 25 November 2024

In September 2024, Amanda Geduld published this excellent piece detailing the ways public schools are failing parents with limited English proficiency. Her article struck several nerves in this schoolteacher/translator! Please read her article in conjunction with my reaction! https://www.the74million.org/article/left-powerless-non-english-speaking-parents-denied-vital-transl... 1) As a kind-of fluent 22-year-old elementary Spanish teacher, I was tapped to interpret for IEP meetings, disciplinary conferences and phone calls—tasks for which I was ill-prepared and ill-suited. I was unfamiliar with the vocabulary and concepts of individualized education plans in English as well as Spanish, and I had never noticed how easily distracted I am before I realized I’d zoned out of the conversation I was supposed to interpret… Even now, 20 years into my document translation career, I am a terrible interpreter. Translation and interpreting are different professions, but the distinction is not well understood outside the industry (in fact, even Geduld’s article uses the terms interchangeably). At the beginning of my teaching career, I was only a translation student, many years away from even attempting the ATA exam. 2) It's true that parents have the right to a competent interpreter. It's also true that professonal or even semi-professional interpreters can be nearly impossible to locate. In a later position as ESL coordinator in a K-8 district, it was my responsibility to track down a local Turkish interpreter for our parents. I actually did find one, but he was not interested in the gig. So—what now? We were never able to find Vietnamese interpreters, either. In those pre-Google Translate days, even if a suitable professional could be found, there were so many reasons to turn down a school gig: lack of familiarity with the subject matter, unavailability before 3 pm, unavailability due to existing workload, small to zero budget—come to think of it, that was the probably the main reason. 3) Schools cannot be all things to all students. Public schools literally feed students when parents cannot do so. Teachers, nurses and counselors stock soap and other personal care items for students who cannot be expected to show up clean for school. Before and after care programs exist for students who would otherwise be unsupervised at home. Schools are required to intervene when domestic abuse or neglect is suspected. Schools are expected to verify student residency and vaccination status. In short, schools already provide a wide variety of social services in addition to education; however, language equity is a highly specialized branch of social work, and government-mandated interpreters and translators should be funded at the federal level. Funding interpretation services via local school taxes too often results in the schools most in need of services having the most limited budgets. 4) I fully support and applaud NAETISL’s development of a national certification for education interpreters. Federally certified court interpreters and National Board certified medical interpreters already exist. As a document translator who specializes in academic translation, I am unaware of any similar credentials for translators at this time. American Translators Association certification is a national credential for document translation, but I do not know of any specialization certificates by ATA. 5) I’m going to just say it: the United States remains xenophobic. We have a shortage of language professionals because our society still does not value or promote dual-language proficiency. We are still moving past the mentality that bilingualism represents a threat to our security or is otherwise un-American, and we certainly have not reached the point where bilingualism is expected from the average educated adult. The mentality that immigrants of past generations assimilated to the Melting Pot is both outdated and inaccurate: in reality, countless immigrant children covered for their parents while doing their best to hide their “otherness.” If they could not acquire enough English for the mainstream workforce, they worked in neighborhood businesses. Immigrant children who successfully learned English often left their native languages with their families, rather than further their bilingual skills. Mainstream American culture was openly hostile toward the very languages of “others” for many generations. When the Equal Educational Opportunity Act was codified in 1974, there wasn’t a large pool of Americans with comparable linguistic skills in two languages, let alone a pool of certified professionals—in fact, the first federal certified court interpreter exam wouldn’t be administered until 1980. In the late 1990s in New Jersey, public schools were required to provide instruction in “world languages” but were not required to hire a teacher. (Because of this loophole, voters in my district refused to increase their taxes to pay a world language instructor, so my position was replaced by videos.) Foreign Language Experience (aka FLEX) programs providing a limited introduction to several languages fulfilled the NJ mandate. There was no requirement to repeat the same languages or increase the level of difficulty from one year to the next. FLEX programs may have been fun for students, but the program design could not contribute to any meaningful level of language acquisition. High school and college foreign language curricula continue to focus on literature and history, with translation and interpretation training programs remaining scarce. We simply have not raised enough language professionals to fulfill the very worthy intentions of the EEOA. Not yet. There’s hope, of course. There is value in exposing the ordeals of parents who do not speak English. There is value in sharing the struggles of schools expected to hire non-existent professionals and find a way to pay them. There are no easy answers, and it will probably be another generation or two before the EEOA can be implemented as intended. As I see it, we need to start with communication-based second language aquisition as a basic, integral component of education. This sounds scary to foreign language teachers, but ESL teachers have been doing it for decades. We need to make students aware that translation and interpretation jobs are critical. We need to value the expertise of language professionals instead of equating them with apps. We need to pay translators and interpreters as professionals. We need to fund schools so they can hire language professionals when necessary. Only when all these measures become the norm can we legitimately criticize schools that fail to hire professional interpreters. Just my two cents. Thanks for reading!