Originally organized in 1960 as the 142d Intelligence Company, the 300th Military Intelligence Brigade (Linguist) has 1,200 linguists in uniform, dwarfing most of the top 20 private-sector language service providers in total employment. The 300th holds an annual language conference in Utah, with this year’s event drawing Everette Jordan of the U.S. government’s National Virtual Translation Center (NVTC) in Washington and Glen “Obi-Glen-Kenobi” Nordin (AKA the godfather of the military language community).

With everyone who’s anyone from government circles in Salt Lake City for the 300th’s conference, Brigham Young University’s Center for Language Studies mobilized a Translation Summit that brought together the various constituencies in America’s language community — academe, government, translators, and industry. The defense language community was well represented, including the U.S. Army’s recruiting effort for linguists (see photo: “Linguists Wanted — Outsmart Badguys”). One government official noted that the posting of captured Iraqi documents in hopes that speakers of Arabic will translate them à la open source “is a bad idea whose time has come.” But that’s another story.

The resulting translation summit drew lots of academics and government types, but missed on the private sector demand side. Not surprisingly, the conference speakers addressed the oft-repeated litany of language industry topics which discussant Don DePalma summarized in the closing session:

• Communicating the value of language services to both the public and private sectors
• Increasing the collaboration among participants in the language service sector, including government, the academy, and industry
• Increasing the certification of practicing interpreters and translators
• Pumping up the culture of language in government and science, an elusive goal since Sputnik popped in October 1957
• Lowering the confusion around tools so that less time is spent in unproductive debates around machine translation vs. human translation — and more time is dedicated to improving translator tools

The delegates ended the conference in search of a BHAG — that is, a big hairy audacious goal, Jim Collins’ memorable 1990’s management buzzword for an ambitious objective. Delegates suggested 2 BHAGs: Getting every military officer to study a foreign language and making every CEO conversant in another tongue. We anxiously await the funding and attention that will make those BHAGs a reality, but given traditional under-funding of language programs, we won’t hold our breath waiting for our proposed No Linguists Left Behind Act.