After an attempted terrorist attack on a Detroit-bound flight on Christmas Day 2009, President Obama revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies had collected but then failed to piece together different threads of information about the suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Sound familiar? Just like the many warnings that were captured but went untranslated prior to 9/11, this latest incident highlights one of the U.S. government’s biggest counter-terrorism challenges – multilingual information management.While the attempted December attack differs from the pre-9/11 warnings in that, to our knowledge, it did not involve translation, the lesson is the same: managing flows of information across multiple countries, languages, and cultures is a complex undertaking. It requires both money and planning.

However, money isn’t really the problem. As a new report from Common Sense Advisory shows, the U.S. federal government spent US$4.5 billion on translation and interpreting services over the last 20 years (from 1990 through 2009). Most of these funds were disbursed in the past few years alone.

Uncle Sam spent more than a billion dollars on language services in 2008, with a similar expenditure in 2009. Of these amounts, the vast majority went toward defense activities – paying human interpreters to risk their lives alongside soldiers — or multilingual intelligence gathering — hiring linguists to listen to thousands of hours of recordings to spot clues for counter-terrorism operations.

In 2008, the U.S. federal government issued more than 12,000 contracts for language services, including 90 contracts valued at one million dollars or more. The Department of the Army spent US$833.6 million on 774 translation and interpreting contracts (see “Language Services and the U.S. Federal Government,” Dec09).

No matter how many multi-million-dollar contracts the U.S. government issues for translation and interpreting services, the true measure of success will be in the government’s ability to protect and maintain its national security. To achieve that goal, intelligence agencies will need to boost their capacity on the planning side — to translate, prioritize, and disseminate the information to which they already have access — in a more timely and organized fashion than ever before.