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Press Room
Congressional Statements

Testimony of David Alba, Assistant Director, Investigative Services Division, FBI
Before the International Security, Proliferation and Federal Services Committee
Senate Governmental Affairs Committee
September 14, 2000
"The FBI's Foreign Language Program"

Good morning, Mr. Chairman. I appreciate the opportunity to talk to you about the FBI's foreign language program. Among other things I'm responsible for the FBI's foreign language program itself. I'm also fluent in Spanish and can speak firsthand of the value of foreign language expertise in law enforcement as well as in national security investigations.

The 1990 census figures show that almost 14 percent of approximately 30 million people in the United States speak a foreign language at home. Many of these people will be victims or subjects or witnesses in our investigations.

When you look at the FBI's major initiatives, such as foreign counterintelligence, international terrorism, international drug investigations and multi-national white-collar crime, foreign language ability becomes even more critical.

The FBI looks primarily at three different sources for foreign language support and that's the special agents themselves, language specialists who are full-time employees and contract linguists. Fifteen years ago the language needs of the FBI were predictable, but today things have changed dramatically. Spanish continues to be one of our seven critical language needs. The other six are Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Farsi and Vietnamese. The FBI never has enough agents or linguists who speak these critical languages.

A few times a year the FBI receives a request for a language we've never heard of. These include Twi, Avar and Gypsy. Sometimes it's just a challenge identifying the language, but it's more difficult to find somebody who can translate a tape or a document from that language into English, often under pressure of short deadlines.

Court-authorized electronic surveillance is highly effective and often involves a foreign language. Criminals usually use coded language to cover their activity and this complicates the issue even further. In 1993 you may remember the plot to bomb several New York landmarks by radical followers of an Egyptian sheik. The codeword used for the bombs was the Arabic word "Hadduta," which literally means a child's bedtime story when translated from Arabic. It sounded innocent enough but it became obvious that something was wrong when the suspects talked about preparing four "Hadduta," renting a warehouse for the "Hadduta" and buying oil and fertilizer for the "Hadduta."

We know that not all people who speak a foreign language are able to translate or even fewer are able to interpret. These are very difficult and separate skills. Last year the FBI language specialists and contract linguists translated over a million pages of documents and countless hours of audio material. With the growing demand for certain languages the work continues to back up. When we're talking about unaddressed work coming from critical national security related investigations, the implications are very sobering.

One problem we have is being able to keep some of our contract linguists busy enough so they won't be looking for other jobs. In some languages the volume of work never ends, but in others the amount of work may be intensive only for a few months, and when we need the language again, often after a period of months or even years our linguists, contract linguists have found other jobs and now we start recruiting, testing and processing all over again, which is very time consuming.

The FBI is now working with other Department of Justice components to develop common language proficiency and security standards for linguists, who will have access to law enforcement sensitive information. That problem does not necessarily exist in the intelligence community, but it does exist in law enforcement.

The project is to create a database accessible to law enforcement components that contain all known linguistic resources by specialty, for example an interpreter or translator or a monitor, and also give language skill levels and an important thing for us, security clearances.

We're always looking for new and innovative ways to find linguists and process language, foreign languages. We have a very active foreign language training program, and another source of support is something that's been mentioned already today is the machine translation. I've been told that in some languages it may be as accurate as 80 percent, but still you need a linguist to prepare it. So in essence what it does, especially on documents, it's kind of like a document triage. It does help.

The language requirements have multiplied several times over. For example, agents we have working on the border now who do not speak Spanish cannot take complaints in Spanish, interview victims or witnesses, nor can they develop informants in Spanish. Because of the influx of Spanish-speaking and other immigrants into the United States, this situation is happening not only on the border but the rest of the country.

I appreciate the opportunity to brief the Subcommittee on things that are critical to FBI operations and would be happy to answer any questions.