Politicians favour public translation help for translation backlogs

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Congressional intelligence committees urged the U.S. government on Friday to let the public help translate a massive backlog of documents captured in counterterrorism operations, Reuters reports.

As part of the war on terror, U.S. and allied forces have seized millions of pages of documents and digital texts since the September, 11th attacks but federal institutions are unable to deal with the amounts of untranslated texts.

Despite continuous efforts to hire trained linguists, the Pentagon, CIA, FBI and other agencies have often bemoaned a shortage of translators and interpreters in Arabic and other Middle Eastern and Asian languages leading to a growing backlog of material.

"The sheer volume of materials that we have obtained is overwhelming our intelligence community's ability to properly categorize and translate the contents, analyze and review the information, verify authenticity and report to users the knowledge generated," Roberts and Hoekstra said in a letter to intelligence czar John Negroponte.

They suggested that many of the documents should be made publicly accessible, for example by posting them on the Internet, so linguists in the public could help translate the information so intelligence officials could focus on the most vital data.

Source: Reuters.com