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Military starts its drive to promote English services

The military has taken steps to promote the use of English throughout the services, in a move it hopes will help it prepare for the future.

In order to achieve its goal, the military plans to produce bilingual English-Chinese handbooks of doctrine and operational manuals by next year.

It also hopes to commence coalition exercises with a friendly country by 2006, sources said.

Furthermore, the military has decided that by 2008, all documents at higher levels of command will have to be written in both English and Chinese. This last goal is considered much more difficult to achieve than the first two.

Still, the Ministry of National Defense (MND) has already taken some steps this year toward creating a bilingual environment.

All personnel at the ministry office, for example, have to wear identification cards that are in English and Chinese. The name plates outside all the offices at the ministry have also become bilingual.

However, the drive toward bilingualism has so far been launched only at higher levels of command or at academic institutions.

As asked about the change, an ministry official said these little changes are much easier to make than the changes that must take place if the military is to reach the goals that have been set for it in the next five years.

"Turning handbooks of doctrine and operational manuals into bilingual versions is not difficult, since these materials were mostly translated from English in the very beginning," the official said.

"To start coalition exercises with a friendly country does not require very good English capabilities. What is more important is the sharing of codes between the two countries," he said.

"What is really difficult for us is to write documents in bilingual format. It does not make sense. Documents are for internal use only. Are they supposed to be given to the Americans for reference?"

The promotion of English across the services will start with education. The ministry has decided that cadets of all military institutes have to achieve certain levels of English proficiency before graduation.

But the ministry has yet to work out standards for the evaluation of cadets' English capabilities. A defense official who has knowledge of the affair said it is difficult to set up universal standards for all military institutes, since different services demand different levels of English capability.

"The air force, for instance, has higher demands for English speaking capabilities. So does the navy. In comparison, the army does not require such good English," the official said.

"We will let each military institute decide what level of English it wants from its students," he said.

The army, though less in need of good English-speaking personnel, does not want to be seen as being unable to keep up with the times.

For example, the army points out that it is now training a group of personnel to take delivery of the first batch of M109A6 Paladin self-propelled howitzers bought from the US.

The training is very much focused on improving the English-speaking capabilities of the troops who will use the guns.

The army says that those personnel who go to the US to receive the Paladins will become fluent English speakers before they start their journey.
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