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The US edges its way through a linguistic minefield

The Korean interpreter for US diplomats in negotiations with North Korea says an agreement reached a month ago in China "is a linguistic minefield" of "hidden meanings and obfuscation."

In an intriguing essay about the difficulties of communicating across national cultures, political systems and languages that are so utterly different, Tong Kim wrote: "It took one day for the accord to melt into misunderstanding and mistrust."

To take but one example, the Americans and North Koreans -- along with Chinese, Japanese, Russians and South Korean negotiators in the six-party talks intended to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions -- agreed that they would consider supplying a nuclear reactor to generate electricity to North Korea at an "appropriate time."

The day after the accord was signed, the North Koreans said that meant now. To the Americans, Kim said, it meant "somewhere between yesterday and never."

In another instance, North Korea supposedly committed itself to abandoning "all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs." In translation, however, the North Koreans used a verb that, Kim said, "could be interpreted to mean leaving the weapons in place rather than dismantling them," which is what the US insisted on.

Kim, born and brought up in Seoul, moved to the US in 1972 and served for 27 years as a State Department interpreter. He sat in on almost every high-level US-North Korean meeting for more than a decade, including 17 visits to Pyongyang. His essay appeared on the Web site of the Nautilus Institute, napsnet@nautilus.org.

"I listened as these two countries' officials talked past each other, attaching different meanings and significance to the same words," Kim wrote. "This happens often enough to people speaking the same language; when they're using languages as different as English and Korean it's even more common."

"The words are hard enough to decipher," he said. "They come with traditions, hang-ups, and history."

When the US demanded an "irreversible" end to Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions, the North Koreans bridled because it made them seem like a defeated nation. After the US switched to "permanent," they became less obstinate, Kim said.

Kim's findings would seem applicable to the US venture into Iraq, an Arab nation profoundly different from the US in culture, politics, and language. Yet the US is painfully short of linguists and specialists in Arab culture.

Jennifer Bremer, a US diplomat in Cairo for three years and now an adviser to the University of North Carolina's Center for the Study of Middle East and Muslim Civilizations, has said only 35 American diplomats are capable of speaking Arabic well enough to engage in a clear and cogent discussion of US policy before an Arab audience.

"This little band cannot possibly cover our need to understand and be understood across 21 embassies and consulates in a region with a population approaching 300 million people, and one, moreover, with very different dialects from east to west," she wrote in the Washington Post.

"There is no substitute for having Americans who can communicate -- really communicate -- in the local language. The failure to field more diplomats who speak the language gives unhelpful support to the view that the United States just does not take the Arab world seriously," she wrote.

The Defense Department is in the same fix despite having 140,000 troops fighting an insurgency in Iraq. Not long ago the press section in the US headquarters in Baghdad had 50 military and civilians on the staff, none of whom spoke Arabic.

Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, who has served in Iraq and is on duty in the Pentagon now, has written that Iraqi insurgents have at least one distinct advantage over US soldiers: "They don't need to allocate translators to combat patrols. They understand the tribal loyalties and family relationships that play such an important role in the politics and economies of many developing nations. They have an innate understanding of local patterns of behavior that is simply unattainable by foreigners."

Nagl adds that the Army is seeking to overcome this fault.

"Programs to recruit additional Arabic speakers are underway in both the active army and in the National Guard," he said, "adding another essential weapon to the counterinsurgency capability of the nation."

Few of these difficulties are new but they constitute a lesson that evidently needs to be relearned time and again. As a colorful and experienced British correspondent in Southeast Asia, Dennis Bloodworth, cautioned 35 years ago: "East and West do not speak the same language, even when it is English."

Richard Halloran is a writer based in Hawaii.
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