Found in Translation

Down with Potatoe s
In Iran, the phrase Marg bar Amrika (
) is often chanted at rallies and seen on signs held
by unhappy protesters. The phrase is most commonly translated literally as “Death to America,” but
it actually means “Down with America.” Hooman Majd, a former interpreter for Iranian President
Ahmadinejad, has explained that “Death to America” is far too harsh of a translation. As Majd
pointed out, Ahmadinejad also handed out potatoes in exchange for votes, after which protesters
chanted “Marg bar seeb zameeni!” They were literally saying, “Death to potatoes,” but it’s pretty
far-fetched to assume that their intention was to kill the spuds.
19
Multilingual Intelligence
Imagine getting paid to read blogs and social media content all day long.
Sound like a dream job? Well, there are people who do get paid to do it, but
they don’t exactly work from home in their pajamas, nor do they spend their
days logged onto TMZ.com. You’re much more likely to find them sitting in
an office where a secret clearance is required because they work primarily for
defense contractors. Those companies in turn work for the U.S. government,
providing intelligence-gathering services.
They’re translators—sort of. Their actual job titles can vary widely,
depending on which company employs them, but their job almost always
requires them to do translation. The difference is that they are paid not just to
translate information but to analyze the content of what they are translating.
Most commonly, they’re known as media analysts, but don’t let that seemingly
simple title fool you. The job these bilingual individuals carry out is actually
quite complex.
20

---

Media analysts perform many functions, but their job boils down to one
main thing: Find out what’s going on in a given place and make sense of it.
They track information from a country or region they know intimately—most
often it’s a place they grew up in or lived in extensively, and where they are
likely to still have relatives and friends. They are highly specialized in the
region and know it like the back of their hands.
And of course, they know the language, too. There has been extremely high
demand in recent years for Chinese media analysts, as well as Arabic, Farsi,
and Urdu, but also Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Ukrainian, and a host of other
languages.
How do they do it exactly? Their work involves many different tasks. They
find and track the sites of regional bloggers. They keep an eye on the local
media environment and the different technologies being used. When critical
communications “of ideological significance” are detected, they not only
provide translations of this information but write up an analysis of what they
think it really means for the local culture. They also identify key influencers
and communicators in the media to create a media map of sociopolitical views.
And they even measure the viral effectiveness of key messages and important
themes. In addition, they use predictive analysis tools to identify trends and
statements and their impact within a given region. Typically, even though they
are expected to perform translation tasks, they do not have a professional
background in translation but rather in journalism, media, or public relations.
In other words, they are expected to translate information not only at the
level of “what does this say?” but at the level of “what does it mean?” and
perhaps more important, when a critical situation arises, “what does it really
mean?” While translators in most other fields are trained to come up with the
best possible translation, in this particular setting, media analysts need to come
up with many different ways to view a given situation as well as identify the
strongest hypothesis for what the eventual outcome might be.
How is this information used for intelligence purposes? Consider this
scenario. When Kim Jong-il’s son Kim Jong-un was promoted to a senior
position in the ruling Workers’ Party, here’s what U.S. intelligence wanted to
know: Is the father grooming him to take over due to health issues? How is the
public responding? Or take the example of uprisings in Syria. Intelligence
gatherers asked these questions: What are the long-term prospects for
President Bashar al-Assad’s regime? According to local reports, is the country
about to fall into civil war? Have chemical imports been rising, illicit or
otherwise? How likely is the government to use its chemical weapons against
its own people? These are the kinds of questions that media analysts deal with

---

on an ongoing basis. They might not always be able to provide specific
answers, but their job is to review the information they have in front of them
and to provide the best possible summaries of likely scenarios. Their analysis
may not always be what is considered “actionable intelligence,” but it’s
intelligence nonetheless, and decisions are made based on their work each and
every day.