On the newly inaugurated U.S. President’s second full workday, he flexed some linguistic muscle, speaking with a State Department worker in Bahasa Indonesia, which he learned while living in Jakarta as a child. The 44th president follows in the footsteps of earlier multilingual commanders-in-chief, such as Jefferson, Adams, and Hoover. Now that the crowds of millions have left the mall and the ball gowns have been sent to the Smithsonian, the question on everyone’s mind is a practical one: “How will the change in administration affect the language sector?” In our predictions for 2009, we wrote that “the first Global American President will focus more attention on international communication — and the requisite translation and interpretation.” We already see a few likely possibilities on the horizon:

• Interpreters move from combat zones to conference rooms. With the State Department’s renewed attention on diplomacy recently announced by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and the Obama administration’s promise to withdraw from Iraq, it is likely that the lucrative contracts for providing wartime interpreters will begin to fade away. Also vanishing — we hope — will be the US$25,000 bounties on the heads of those interpreters and the news of their deaths in battle.
• Language seen as a path to global competitiveness. Over the past eight years, linguistic resources were valuable to the degree in which they advanced security and intelligence initiatives. On the road to the White House, Obama made frequent mention of his desire to enable the U.S. to compete in the global economic landscape. The most important languages for trade and commerce are not likely to be Dari and Pashto, but rather languages like Chinese and Portuguese. In fact, our e-GDP-guided availability quotient could help determine which languages take priority for localizing the currently monolingual whitehouse.gov.
• Existing linguistic diversity harvested. We have written about the government’s challenges in finding sufficient linguistic resources. The government’s focus was on grooming Americans to learn new languages from scratch, as opposed to doing what vendor managers and training deparments of language services providers (LSPs) around the world do every day — find people who speak the high-priority languages natively, and give them training in translation or interpreting. While language education is no doubt important, we hope that the new administration will realize the benefits of harvesting the linguistic fruits of immigration while still farming anew with an eye toward the future.
• Greater recognition of domestic linguistic minorities. President Obama’s was the first U.S. inaugural address in history to use the word “Muslim,” in acknowledgment of the nation’s estimated eight million muslims, a segment of the population whose growing importance we discussed more than a year ago. While there is growing recognition of the stateside Spanish-speaking community, this market, too, remains linguistically underserved.
• Improved access to human, civil, and language rights. No more than a few days after Obama entered office, the Food and Drug Administration approved the first human trials of an embryonic stem-cell derived treatment. Federal agencies are taking the lead from the new members of the executive branch, and we believe that what the FDA’s announcement says for science will be true of the Department of Justice’s commitment to ensuring that the law is followed, especially where civil rights are concerned, language rights principal among them. In fact, just two days after the inauguration, the DOJ issued a new Request for Proposals for Spanish translation and interpreting services.

The new administration offers enormous possibilities for reinvigorated activity and enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which could have important impacts on the language services industry. To read more about this topic, register and download our latest Quick Take, written in conjunction with Title VI expert Bruce Adelson, “Title VI Enforcement to Grow under Obama.”

Given the grim economic news that abounds at every turn, the logical question is, “But where will we find the money?” This is nothing new — the same question was posed even during times of economic surplus. Still, government providers are motivated not just by dollars and cents, but by dollars and sense — language services alleviate many societal headaches. When the only other options are to let an accused rapist walk free without a trial, to allow a child to drown before help can arrive at the scene, or to risk a public health outbreak, it becomes clear that these language services do not fall into the discretionary spending category. Instead of simply crossing out the language-related budgetary line items, organizations will have to look for efficiencies in processes and technology to maximize access while minimizing costs and complying with the law.