Slashdot Mirror
US Government Seeks Open-Source Translation
valdean writes "The Boston Globe is reporting that last week the United States Government began publishing captured Iraqi documents on the web in order to harness the translating talents of the bilingual public. The article calls it 'the same open source principle' that created Linux. Check out the Foreign Military Studies Office's document portal."
I think it's a great idea, but how many people will have to translate a document with similar results before it can be trusted?
--
Posted with the Slashdot Firefox extension.
What if it turns out that the document is talking about something that the US finds it needs to classify? Too late then...
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I fail to see how the term 'open-source' is applicable to a translation. Is the belief that if a number of people contribute to something, that it's open-source?
"I want to rip the American's throats out and shove it up their asses -- Anonymous Pissed Sunni"
"I want to rip the American's throats out and shove it up their asses -- Saddam"
"I want to rip the American's throats out and shove it up their asses -- Bin Laden"
"I want to rip the American's throats out and shove it up their asses -- Iran"
I think I'm getting the hang of this translation stuff.
Table-ized A.I.
The fact that they're releasing the documents is somewhat less "imperialist".
go hug a tree
Why don't they put the NSA's crack team on ti, they seem to be good at this sort of thing. Or they couls hire translators? Maybe they are just trying to ferret out people who show too much interest in these documents?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Nothing to see here, move along... this piece of document is just a grocery list and does not hint at any secret treasure caches in the very least. Oh, and on an unrelated note, I won't be available for translation in the next couple of weeks, as I'm planning to visit my, uh, family in Iraq.
See you, suckers!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's the "I'm too cheap to do it myself" open-source movement.
So "open source" is now anything that's a free/community project?
Do the Amish then have "open source" barn raisings?
If they'd followed the same principle with the intelligence that before the war they claimed they had, and after the war they claimed was "bad intelligence" (whoops!)-- I mean, if they'd just published the "Saddam has WMDs" intelligence on the internet and asked "hey, can anyone fact check this?"-- we wouldn't be in a war needing random volunteers to translate Iraqi documents in the first place.
Of course it would also help if they were a bit smarter with their hiring policies to begin with.
Right. Please enlighten us all on how them releasing it has any affect whatsoever on the informations end use. I hope you have something better than that.
Family in Iraq? Good luck visiting them now that you're on the no-fly list.
I won't be available for translation in the next couple of weeks, as I'm planning to visit my, uh, family in Iraq.
You misspelled Guantanamo. And years, too.
Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking about doing, working for free for the US government ...
"We thank our American friends and allies for liberating our country -- US DOD "
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I'm sure we're going to get a bunch of shopping lists, a letter to a neighbor decrying imperialist nations, and a tawdry tale or two.
Tluin natha Linux xxizzuss uriu olt bwael mon'tun.
Just worked on one, got this: REQUEST FOR URGENT BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP first, i must solicit your strictest confidence in this transaction. this is by virtue of its nature as being utterly confidential and 'top secret'. i am sure and have confidence of your ability and reliability to prosecute a transaction of this great magnitude involving a pending transaction requiring maxiimum confidence. we are top official of the iraqi government contract review panel who are interested in imporation of goods into our country with funds which are presently trapped in fallujah. in order to commence this business we solicit your assistance to enable us transfer into your account the said trapped funds. the source of this fund is as follows; during the last military regime here in iraq, the government officials set up companies and awarded themselves contracts which were grossly over-invoiced in various ministries. the present civilian government set up a contract review panel and we have identified a lot of inflated contract funds which are presently floating in the central bank of iraq ready for payment, some to halliburton, some to you.
John Loftus translation services has volunteered hundreds of man hours (no woman hours please, he's a Republican) to ensure a "Fair and Balanced"(tm) translation.
Amazingly enough, every singe document details proof that Saddam had WMD programs in place!
We have the proof! Bush was right! The war is justified!
We always had the proof.
No one ever doubted Saddam had WMD. Clinton was a coward and a Commie for not going to war to kill him. Bush Sr. would have finished it but the French must have chickened out at the last second, leaving us without support we were counting on. That's why we're invading France in 2015...
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
And you continue sucking your dear dictator's dick. Erm, I meant "president". _
Maybe it's just me here, but most people in the OSS community seem pretty bright people. Bright people tend to rather dislike the Bush government and would go out of their way to NOT help them.
I mean seriously, what type of people will want to support this government. All they get back in return is the loss of basic human rights and in the future finger pointing. It's a lose-lose situation.
I like muppets.
This is properly tantamount to a voluntary tax upon bilinguals. The State is asking these people to spend their time translating for free; the tax is the money these people do not make since they cannot spend this time working.
I think it's indecent, given that the current overall real tax rate on individuals is 50%.
The State should pay for the services it requires. Why is it asking for people to pay more tax, voluntarily?
If the military would stop discharging Arabic and Farsi translators simply because they were gay, there were would be less of reason to turn to the public to do this work.
I think they are forgetting that (for some deranged part of our society), creating Linux was fun. Will translating orders for toilet paper for the Iraqi National Guard mess hall be fun too? Only if you can write your translation as a perl poem!
David W. Hogg -- assoc prof, NYU Physics
US government publishing some "captured" Iraqi documents. Of course there are many documents that should not be published, like the process for purchasing poison gas from Don Rumsfeld to poison one's politically inconvenient neighbors. Maybe just the receipts and thank-you notes. But I expect they won't be publishing many of the documents the US military captured when it raided Ahmed "Castro" Chalabi's office, before he fled back to his Iranian spy office. Because those Chalabi docs are all covered by Bush's "Executive Secret" status, just like their carbon copies in Cheney's DC file cabinet.
--
make install -not war
'nuff said.
If the government wants translation done, then they can damn well pay for it. Do they look for "open source" workers to manufacture weapons free of charge? The fact that they value this translation so little that they aren't willing to pay for it speaks volumes about priorities.
I went to both links in an attempt to do my patriotic duty by helping with the translation but all I got was an article talking about it and a page with the results of translation. What is a patriot to do?
Article reads: It's the same ''open source" principle that drove the successful development of the Internet and of powerful free software like the Linux operating system
Unfortunately we have to wait a few more years until we see the US documents released about their involvement in Iraq. As these are probably managed on a windows based solution, unlikely public release will ever happen.
-- Neminem laede, immo omnes, quantum potes, iuva.
This is not the same open source principle that created Linux.
It is the same filthy principle by which Microsoft takes the work of others and combines it into the closed source product to suit their own purposes.
isn't this the same government that is trying to argue that having to get warrants for wiretaps tips our interest in a suspect?
so what then is posting iraqi documents for every iraqi terrorist to read before anyone can translate them going to do?
i say we get rid of everyone running this debacle and start over.
Or:
'Our translators at The P3nt4g0n are Fucking Retards!'
I know... let's get some translation on the cheap by conning the known world into doing it for us.. and we'll use the word 'Linux' to sound cool in the n3rd communities.
Pull the other one, son, it's got bells on!
I think this is a great idea, and all government document should be viewed as this. First, this is not exactly targeting OSS people that design software. We need more projects like this to harness the energies out there. Yes, an universal language is not a bad idea but I don't think you can get everyone to abid by it. Second, even if your a Bush hater, there is no reason not to love your country. Politics is politics, but translating document hardly seems like a partisan view.
I'm perfectly bilingual but will never do that.
The incentive of open-source is that a lot of people will benefit from your work, and not some greedy individual (Thanks to the GPL). For me, it'd be the same as if Gates started up a contest for who could come up with a better OS and Linus and the other hackers handed their work to him. Gates could have then started making profit out of their work.
I am not American, but I'd guess most open-source enthusiasts out there are better informed than the average Joe and are more likely to be opposing the war in the first place.
Res publica non dominetur
Proper translation for international affairs requires in-depth understanding of culture as well as printed text. Automated translation is nice for basic tasks, but when a low-level government official reads "jihad" and starts telling everyone that someone has declared war, the worst is at hand.
In soviet America, the Government open sources you!!
Maybe I'm off base here, but isn't the government supposed to have large computers for things like the Carnivore project? Aren't they supposed to be capable to tapping into about anything on the Interweb? Why don't they just buy some software from babblefish.com and use it to pinpoint what parts of the Internet they really want to have experts read? To start with, a google for allah, then translate as required would be a good start, key words can be added to the process somewhere along the line... It seems unlikely that there would be more than say, oh... 100,000 arabic websites? Couple of days and its all done.. right?
This seems quite an odd thing to me... unless they are trying to ferret out people in the US and allied countries that are both capable of and willing to translate such information. That sounds like some new kind of profiling to me... well, I could just be paranoid...
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
From the website:
"You are entering an Official United States Government System, which may be used only for authorized purposes. Unauthorized modification of any information stored on this system may result in criminal prosecution. The Government may monitor and audit the usage of this system, and all persons are hereby notified that use of this system constitutes consent to such monitoring and auditing."
This is just to create logs of the slashdot effect so they can use this to bring down enemy websites.
This is just plain propaganda, they only release documents for which they know the contents. This is just a bunch of crap
200GB/2TB $7.95 Coupon: SAVE90DOLLAR
of "open source" in this instance.
Learn somethin' new everyday. thx!
I call, "BS", on this story.
The American government already knows what those documents state, in the Iraqi language. The purpose of presenting those documents to the public is to slyly hint, to the Iraqi insurgents, that Washington has even more documents and, more importantly, all the detailed information about their whereabouts and their next set of moves. Washington hopes that this threat just might scare the insurgents into leaving Iraq. Basically, Washington is doing psy-ops (psychological warfare) on the Internet.
The situation in Iraq is dire. Lacking sufficient troops to quell the insurgency, Washington just might exit Iraq, leaving it to spiral into civil war. The latest reports talk about Shiite death squads rounding up Sunnis and executing them. Sometimes, American soldiers are caught in the cross fire.
Washington will do everything (including psy-ops) that it can up until 2007 January 1, the start of the next presidential campaign season. After 2007 January 1, Washington will pull the troops out of Iraqi. On this matter, the veto-proof majority of Republicans and Democrats are united, and they will pull the troops out of this mess. The only people who disagree are George Bush, Condoleeza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld.
you continue sucking your dear dictator's dick
But then they'd have to fire him for being gay...
I can translate the subject: "Operation Iraqi Freedom".
"Operation Iraqi Bloodshed & Expropriation of US Tax Dollars by Military-Industrial Complex"
If they are going to use the term 'open source' and recruit people to do this based on that ideal they need to take it all the way. If they GPL the current & future (translated) documents then maybe we've got something here, but otherwise its akin to slave-labor if you ask me.
Whew! You had me scared for a second.
Luckily, your expert usage of English grammer re-assures me.
Apparently they are only upset at one (unnamed) American who has multiple throats, and they wish to shove each of these up the asses of an (unnamed) third party that consists of more than one person. Or it could be that this particular individual's throats also have asses... which makes the action somewhat circular...
Well, I don't have multiple throats, so my neck must be out of danger... But my ass might be the target of their threat.
Ermm, the question is whether he had any chemical weapons beyond what is known. The US and/or UK governments have admitted that he probably didn't after all.
"They" would be paying for it with "your" tax dollars. Seems the cheaper it can be done the better. Of course, I kind of doubt they'll get many volunteers, and they may not really want any. It may just be a ploy before giving up or handing over another multi-million dollar contract to some company who the taxpayers had no say in selecting..... But that's a different subject.
Also, pretty brave to announce this kind of project in the first place. It kind of means those documents weren't very thoroughly read before the liberation/de-WMD project got started. (Or maybe the money is just running out.)
Yep. If they had the sense to publish the documents on ODF, and encourage ODF responses along with recommending free ODF tools for any citizens who want to help, then they might be a little closer to harnessing the power of an open system.
This is blatant PR on behalf of the military. FTFA:
/., so I needn't address the flaw in methodology. But the problem is that this is no genuine attempt at intelligence, it's merely a showcase for unflattering (and, as the disclaimer attests, possibly plain false) documents and is meant to promote American nationalism. The very first document on the page is about how the bad-man Qusai Hussein ordered prisoners to be used as human shields during the US invasion. The document is more than two years old! Do you really believe this is an example of the cutting edge of our military's translation endeavor? (Okay, I walked right into the incompetence joke on that one.) Perhaps TFA sums it up best:
The US Government has made no determination regarding the authenticity of the documents, validity or factual accuracy of the information contained therein, or the quality of any translations, when available.
Wiki-style scholarship has been criticized sufficiently on
Jonathan Singer, weekend editor of the liberal site MyDD.com, was equally dismissive. ''The Hussein documents are not of great interest to me," said Singer, ''for the simple reason that they simply reinforce the notion that the Bush administration cherry picks intelligence to suit their needs."
Hi Achmed,
Please buy some more halal meat on the way home tonight. It would be great if you could buy some mustard and tabasco as well. We're having a BBQ tonight.
Thanks,
Abdul
---
This document clearly proves that it was a WMD site. Everyone knows that mustard is the code word for mustard gas, and tabasco is the code word for sarin gas. The "halal meat" indicates that they're going to kidnap some people and then test the gases (aka BBQ) on them them.
US government posts these documents to the American public and askes them to translate them
American public translates them and gets shit scared of being killed.
GWB's support and support for the Iraq invasion increases in the US electorate.
Do you really think the US government would post untranslated documents (whos contents is thus unknown) to the Internet? What if one of them laid out the entire covert US spy network within Iraq? Maybe one of them will be a call to arms to insurgents. Maybe one will be a death blow to US public support for being in Iraq.
Since when was the spirit of open source based on "We'll do a bunch of work for you for free"?
That's subtly different from why I work on OS projects. I want to do a bunch of work to solve a problem, and then make it so that no one ever has to solve that problem again, because everyone can benefit from my work.
The difference is that (for me, at least), the motivation is to multiply the work accomplished in the world, per unit of manpower I put into the work. Just doing work for free, while perhaps generous, isn't the same.
You need to translate from Arabic, so you...
1. Fire many of your translators for being gay
2. Wind up with a backlog
3. Ask people you don't know or trust to do the work for free
4. ????
5. Profit!!
Anyone suggested Google translate?
You have circular reasoning in your definition of "bright". To you, anyone who agrees with W can't be bright, so no bright people agree with W. You need to get outside your own little circle and see that there are plenty of smart people who disagree with you.
The burning question is, of course, are homosexuals allowed to work on these translations? I mean, we've been kicking Arabic linguists out of the military for being gay, so obviously reading these documents isn't so important that we'd want gay residue on the translations.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Russia will be open-sourcing captured U.S. documents so the community can help translate them.
(As usual, there is a lack of funding for military intelligence in the U.S., pre and post 9/11.)
"The purpose of presenting those documents to the public is to slyly hint, to the Iraqi insurgents, that Washington has even more documents and, more importantly, all the detailed information about their whereabouts and their next set of moves. Washington hopes that this threat just might scare the insurgents into leaving Iraq. Basically, Washington is doing psy-ops (psychological warfare) on the Internet."
Is this like the time the American govt knew where there were 50 tons of chemical weapons in Iraq?
A plea to the US govt: If you have detailed information about the whereabouts and the next movements about the insurgents please go and get them. Please stop dragging this war out any further then neccassary. Furthermore if you know where the insurgents are and what they are about to do there is no need to further torture people in Iraq and there is no need to ship people to other countries to be tortured.
"Washington will do everything (including psy-ops) that it can up until 2007 January 1, the start of the next presidential campaign season. After 2007 January 1, Washington will pull the troops out of Iraqi."
I thought it was obvious to everybody by now that a war with iran was planned for the next presidential election cycle. Maybe not a full all out invasion but surely ariel bombardment and plenty of nice video of exploding buildings (no ugly dead people please, just the explosions like you see in movies thank you). Just enough to make sure this extremely unpopular president does not harm the chances of making sure then next govt is also dominated by republicans.
A war with Iran combined with diebold rigging the next election in CA should do the trick nicely.
evil is as evil does
The above poster (lol, reporter - as if _that_ lends you any credibility), also has other theories, in case you're interest:
Conspiracy Theorist Has Elaborate Explanation For Why He's Single
>Washington hopes that this threat just might
> scare the insurgents into leaving Iraq.
Because we all know that the nice Iraquis all love us and that
the insurgents arent Iraquis.
Pravda didnt have as many satisfied customers as our media yet the result is stunningly the same in the long run.
Except for the gluttonous militarism, countless deaths for little benefit other than engorging the pocket books of the few, sovereingty violation, and continued financial rape of the American taxpayer by elitist, self justifying, know-nothing symptoms of centralisation. The only benefit of repeated distruction is efficient destruction. cat `which military_industrial_complex` > /dev/null and die.
And your purpose in pointing this out is what? What are you hoping to accomplish? Anything more than the visceral thrill of being able to call bullshit?
" This whole story is odd. The American government has an annual budget exceeding $2.0 trillion [cia.gov], yet that same government cannot seem to buy top-notch translators graduating from the academic pentagon: Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, University of Illinois (at Urbana-Champagne), and University of Wisconson (at Madison)?"
Yes. That is exactly the case. It isn't a matter of money. It's a matter of not enough people with the required skillset. The US government has had numerous open jobs looking for people with these skills for many years and they cannot fill them. This led to a lot of the Intel problems we had prior to Afghanistan and Iraq.
"I call, "BS", on this story. "
Why? Ignorance?
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
I think you've missed the point. The government is not targeting insurgents, it is targeting people outside of Iraq, people who have access to the internet. Especially people in the US, so they can "see how bad the previous regime was".
I think many people project their status onto other, so if everyone you know has a computer and is connected to the internet, and just because you see insurgents advertising on the internet, does not mean that everyone has access to the internet. I've been to the Middle East (not Iraq), where the majority of people do not have computers let alone internet access.
However, you are correct, I call BS as well that they need the "public's" help to translate documents.
Such a scenario won't arise. These documents have likely been translated numerous times over. It's known exactly what they say. This is being done as a propaganda stunt. Nothing more, nothing less.
In fact, the documents may not even be real. They'll say exactly what the administration wants you to hear, but you'll think it's coming straight from the "enemy".
Not only that, but if you know the language to be translated from you might even be mislead into thinking you "autheticated" the documents yourself, when they are false from the onset.
The geeks like 'open source' so lets start something and get even the local nerds involved and make them feel special. To me this is but a signal that this whole "Iraqi freedom" stupidity is reaching its bottom limits. The moment America stops messing about in the Middle East as it has done in Iran (someone remember the situation pre-Ayatollah? The US had a big part in that as well) and now Iraq will be the moment that peace in the Middle East will become very close.
But as long as the US is the worlds biggest oil consumer and the middle east the biggest resource of oil I guess thats never going to happen.
The whole thing makes me sick.
Your anonymous coward
The American government already knows what those documents state, in the Iraqi language
The Iraqi language is commonly known as Arabic.
Basically, Washington is doing psy-ops (psychological warfare)
Actually psy-ops is psychological operations.
Server software: Microsoft-IIS/5.0 Base Content Location: http://leavenworth.army.mil/fmso/fmso/index.htm HTTP Version of Server: HTTP/1.0 Request Time: Sun, 19 Mar 2006 23:05:46 GMT The power of open source is not being used here. Move along.
So, I'm guessing from your flippant remarks that you have no idea what the NSA does? Really, neither do I for the most part, but I sort of speculate that code breaking is not the only thing they do, for example we do know they also bug phones... Maybe, just maybe, they also employ linguists? It's possible, you know.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
The receipts are already in English.
Get your Unix fortune now!
That anyone can find this drivel interesting amazes me. You may want to actually look for the facts in Iraq rather than reading the insane rantings on the democratic underground. Is Iraq a dangerous place? Yes. Is it hopeless and nothing good will ever come from it? Not exactly. If you look at history, after WWII there were American soldiers being killed by insurgents in both Germany and Japan for about seven years. The insurgents are losing in Iraq. What they are hoping for is people like you, aka morons, to keep comparing Iraq to Viet Nam and pushing the US to leave before the job is done. They thank you for your support. But don't expect them to return the favor. If they ever have a chance to kill you, they will.
Washington will do everything (including psy-ops) that it can up until 2007 January 1, the start of the next presidential campaign season. After 2007 January 1, Washington will pull the troops out of Iraqi. On this matter, the veto-proof majority of Republicans and Democrats are united, and they will pull the troops out of this mess. The only people who disagree are George Bush, Condoleeza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld.
I wouldn't be 100% sure on Rumsfeld. He has offered his resignation to President Bush on two different occasions. Regardless of anyone's private feelings, the job of the President's cabinet is to promote the Presiden't agenda. Now, obviously they are in his cabinet because they tend to agree with him, but they do have their own opinions.
Mod parent up!
Why is it that we have had "occupation" in Germany since 1945 and the democrats dont bat an eyelash altho it's caused us more debt than the Iraqi conflict times 5? Because it's about political spin, it's about abusing the deaths of troops to gain political support. It's a sickness and it's clear to people who can see beyond party lines!
These are the same people who stil don't understand why Kerry lost... It's because the majority of Americans don't give a damn about gay marriage, they're sick of liberals trying to force their opinions on us. When you have laws that govern "hate speech" you're going to have resistance. You can not force a people to accept each other and attempts to will raise contempt in the hearts of the subjects... er citizens that you try to force it on.
This whole thing is a crock. It is a way to get more people to read documents. No doubt the documents have been well chosen to work for those presenting them.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
don't teach them english! they'll learn how to do our jobs (programming, telemarketing, etc), and undercut us! take a lesson from the British Empire..
Do we really need more people with hilarious accents? What with India and New Zealand;)
I'm not sure what you're calling BS on. Do you NOT believe that they are releasing the documents?
Good arabic translators (say rated 3+ on the Interagency Language Roundtable scale), particularly ones able to acquire a top secret clearance, command salaries of ~$150k+. This means they probably cost the government $300k+.
At any rate, more transparency into these documents is unarguably a good thing.
Sorry, the rest is classified.
My website
I can't wait to see the lawsuits against the US government for copyright infringement.
(I have to tidy up some code. One source file is 0.25MB of C++ and is basically one looong function. You'd love to help me wouldn't you?)
"The White House is not an intelligence-gathering agency," -- Scott McClellan, Whitehouse spokesman.
It's a little known fact that you can easily read Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew by reflecting the image in a mirror.
This was discovered 500 years ago in Italy. I read about it in the Da Vinci Code.
Maybe they don't want to see the translations, but rather, see who out there understands these languages? Especially people who read alot of it but don't contribute translations back . . . aha! Must be an evildoer!
Naw, I don't really believe it. But it does sound like there must be some sort of workable paranoid conspiracy thing here somewhere . . .
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
first document line 1: atom-bomb construction second document line 1: construction of biological weapons thrid document line 1: the question to the answer "42" fourth document line 1: george w bush's IQ test... result: 85 fifth document line 1: proof that the usa have chemical weapons sixth document line 1: news article: usa try to trick geeks into helping them with their evil plans by making ridiculous comparisons
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
>ariel bombardment
Are you prognosticating the aerial deployment of munitions against a Disney cartoon character, a character from Shakespeare's play "The Tempest", a moon of Uranus, Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock" chief of the sylphs, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel, or an Argentinian footballer?
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking about doing, working for free for the US government
If you're not employed by the federal government and you live and work in the United States, you already do.
blog
Kerry, you mean the guy who voted for the war before he voted against it?
US Government doesn't give enough information to the public there US Government is bad.
US Government Gives Too Much information to the public there US Government is bad.
US Govermnet translates documents to skew them to their own meaning there US Government is bad.
US Government releases documents for the puclic to translate therefore US Government is bad.
Give me a fcking break.
And I won't even bother explaining the tons of goofy dialects that make translating Arabic from anywhere very difficult. You practically have to have a translator born in the neighborhood where the document was written. I took Arabis for a year and went nuts when learning every phrase went like: This is how the phrase is said in Saudi Arabis; this is how it is said in Egypt, this is how it is said in Kuwait, this is how it is said in this part of Bahrain... and so on.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
You are correct, this is pure propoganda. Nothing is served by these documents or peoples efforts to translate them other than to generate fear. This is how a flagging leadership retains control.
Welcome to the war machine you nerds, didn't think your little hobby would get drug along as a mascott did you.
You know what sucks, it works every time every where.
"Americani ite domum".
The American government has an annual budget exceeding $2.0 trillion, yet that same government cannot seem to buy top-notch translators graduating from the academic pentagon...
That's right. They'll spend $12 for a hammer but not even $2 for a translator!
Yes. That is exactly the case. It isn't a matter of money. It's a matter of not enough people with the required skillset. The US government has had numerous open jobs looking for people with these skills for many years and they cannot fill them. This led to a lot of the Intel problems we had prior to Afghanistan and Iraq.
People with the required skillset who apply for a job in the intelligence services are in fact suspect, and cannot easily get security clearance since 911. I isn't easy for an intelligence service to hire a large number of reliable people with specific skills.
Maybe the government translators are too busy writing the documents to translate them? ;)
Blessed are the 1337, for they shall pwn the earth.
Well, you're probably right that they already know what's in a lot of them already. This sounds highly experimental, but it's certainly worth a shot. I guess they'll be wanting to see the noise ratio, and whether enough people with the necessary skills will bother at all.
TFA says they're releasing 'millions of pages', though, which sounds about right for a 'not worth translating, but let's toss it out and see if someone wants to have a go'-amount.
From: bin Ladin
To: Bush Jr. <dubya@whitehouse.gov>
Praises unto your government for the recent decision to publish our dispatches on the web. My operatives have been hampered by inefficient communications. We've often had to resort to cleverly encoding messages into fake accounts on MySpace where each cell leader pretends to be an angsty-yet-hip teenager, or stenographically encoding them into unwholesome Western pornography on so-called TGP sites or into disgusting photos of puppy dogs that the Prophet, Praise Be Unto Him, would have surely kicked. With the new American-funded distribution system, all our troubles with online fools "friending" our cell operatives or heathens posting graven images of their puppy dogs on our forums are over. Now we can simply publish communiques in their proper language and have a Haliburton no-bid contract funded project publish their results. Many thanks! Maybe there will be a place in paradise for you after all.
Oh wait. Bush has declared her and gay's (who appear to be big in the translation world) as enemies of the state.
Wow. You give the government:
a) too much credit for creativity (usually only comes in short bursts
b) too little importance on saving $$$. Everyone is tightening their belts these days. How much do you think it costs for professional translation per page? I'm guessing it's in the hundreds, or even thousands. And how many Iraqi speakers are in the employ of the Feds? If you have a few million pages of stuff (they probably do), then your talking billions, perhaps.
Why not tap into a free resource? If anything comes up at all interesting, then sic your pros on it.
I would like to snatch that tin foil hat right off your pale, trembling head.
Esteemed Sir
...
I am seeking a person of the utmost trustfulness, which I believe you to be the same, to resolve a most delicate matter that has come to light in recently translated documents. I am the personal Financial and Securities Manager to Mr Tariq Aziz of Baghdad City who deposited the sum of 20 million dollars specie in the Bank of Santa Maria et Commerciale, Lagos, for the purchase of tractor parts and chandeliers. By twisted fate my client is unavoidably detained in his domicile to entirely unforeseen social eventualities and has let it be known via said translation that he seeks you to act as intermediary in this matter through a personal bank account
Las qué passoun
tournoun pas maï
Call me stupid, but how did they know that the documents released are not of sensible nature if they have not, somehow, translated them first? And, in this case, why would they need the public to translate it a second time? This smokes bullshit to me.
The situation in Iraq is dire. Lacking sufficient troops to quell the insurgency, Washington just might exit Iraq, leaving it to spiral into civil war.
:)
You know, when I see statements like that, I'm torn between the desire to knock the speakers teeth down his throat, and the desire to break into an extended session of rolling on the floor laughing.
Due to my lack of proximity to you, I ofcourse had to go with the laughter. I'm still wiping the tears off my cheeks. Thanks man, I know it was unintentional, but you totaly made my day
Now, on with the response:
US military deaths in Iraq: 2,317 in 3 years.
WW2: 2,500 men lost in one day amongst airborne divisions during d-day. 300,000 dead in 4 years.
Korea: 54,000 dead in 3 years.
Vietnam: 2,316 lost in one month (May, 1968). 58,226 in 8 years.
But, ofcourse, "the situation in Iraq is dire". Things are so bad that roughly the same number of American soldiers died in one month in Vietnam, and in one day during WW2. I don't know how the American people can ever hope to deal with such a disaster. It's become quite clear that there's no way to win! US forces must return NOW, or at this rate they'll ALL be dead in 80 years or so! Mostly from old age, but still....
I knew of the hiring issue but it never occurred to me that the majority of the people with the required skills are suspect. What crappy situation.
Thanks for the reply. I didn't know about that.
Cheers,
Scott
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
Never what started the WoT:http://911.navexpress.com/
I have to agree, for two reasons. First off, while the whole war, shortage of trasnlators has been a public issue, this is EXTREMLY unlike the US Military, Those documents could easily contain information the iraq's have formed on the united states deffence and offence.
Also, as the highest ranked post states, a group of alquida cohoarts could easily all submit the same translation for a page, saying that on the 20th at 3 am this american military camp near baghdad will be hit with a missle or something of the like. Becuase it will happen within a few hours of when the gov gets notice, they will either let it happen and recognize it later (like 9/11 or the other things they knew about first), or they will take action, like move the camp or something, which could move it into a trap or make it an easier target for an infantry raid.
While I don't expect the above to be likely, I can't see the military being powerless enough to need WORLDWIDE contribution for reading anything from captured top secret, to routine documents. My bet is that they are using this to spread their own disinformation. Take one captured iraq command leader, forge alot of documents of him stating the futility of the fight, and how he knows their side has no chance. Release those documents variously, discourage the enemy, lower their will to fight, etc, standard psychological warefare....
I mean, you gotta think, our militarys PSYOPS units have to be doing something other then that stupid burning bodies of enemies and saying on a loudspeaker 'come get us cowards save your burning comards bodies from being tainted you are not talibs you are cowards' to try to lure them into advantageous situations.
It dosen't add up, and if it does, it adds up to our military being so powerfull and funded that it can't do anything right....
Sibel Edmunds and others have pointed out that many of the translators that the CIA and NSA used were either incompetant or they were traitors, purposely lieing about what a doc said.
While there may be a psych op going on, it is possible that they are post translating docs that have already been translated once( keep in mind that they had a serious backlog). If say 5 translation occur and they are similar, but the one that the cia employee did was wrong, it would indicate that there is a problem with them. This would allow them to quickly pinpoint who the traitors are within the translation ranks.
I suspect that they are finally getting around to solving what Ms. Edmunds has tried to tell us for 3 years, but was stifled.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I just don't believe that they'd put documents of unknown content up for all to read. That could easily expose the US government to all sorts of scandals, assuming that paperwork was kept for many of those transactions from the days when the US had a good friend in Saddam (or at least didn't care about his murderous nature).
Imagine a document written by Hussein "Met that fool Rumsfeld today. Thanked him for the poison gas and dirty bombs. I don't know why they're illegal in the US - they're selling them to me! Shook his hand and got my picture taken."
Okay - that's completely made up (except the photo, which is a matter of record), but it's not hard to imagine a similar circumstance. Many western countries had dealings with Hussein, and they weren't just buying oil.
There's massive potential for embarrassment on the scale of Abu Ghraib if something really bad gets out.
That makes me think that these documents are already translated, in order to show the world what an evil bugger Hussein was, but show no taint of the US/EK/French involvement in his rise to power and maintenance of position.
It's great PR when people can read an internal document detailing evil acts. There's no doubt then! Not that anyone doubts now, but still.
Your claims of resistance in postwar Germany and Japan are bogus. Also, the motivation for resistance would be pretty weak - after all the US occupation forces were the only thing holding the Russians back.
I think the original post was about dropping leaflets printed in Ariel font. That'll mess up whoever tries to read them.
Insurgent Open Source Translation team:
Is that a "1"?
No - it is an "I"! You idiot!
Oh no no no my friends - it is an "l".
It could be the "pipe symbol", yes?
.. paranoid crackpot leftover from the days of Amiga.
Zarqawi's Jordanian prison file:http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/documents-do cex/Iraq/ISGZ-2004-019920.pdf
Afghanistani documents:http=http://www.ctc.usma.edu/harmony_doc s.asp
Iraqi documents:http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/product s-docex.htm
an index to some of the documents:http://fmso.leavenworth.army.mil/product s-docex.htm#iraq
Then there is this basic analysis that was done years ago:http://www.atheists.org/Islam/mohammedanism.ht ml
more later
...and you want them to retroactively apply the language change over the last 10 years?
Well said. I'm out of mod points (and have been for a while -- I must have displeased someone, somewhere), but you really deserve someone.
The only way we could possibly EVER LOSE the conflict in Iraq, are if a lot of people believe what the GP is saying, namely that we're already losing. It's a self-fulfilling prophesy, based on emotion-laden drivel.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Would that we were that clever. Unfortunately, this move appears to be purely political. It was instigated by ideologues Stephen F. Hayes and Pete Hoekstra, who have been demanding that the documents be released publicly so that all the brilliant Arabic translators in the right wing blogosphere can mine them for "evidence" that Saddam had WMD and ties to al-Qaeda all along. It's a canard; Negroponte's office has already looked through the documents and found nothing that interesting, and they warn that there won't be much beyond historical interest here. It is doubtful any of the documents have much to say about the current insurgency, since they are mostly older. This is a political move by Republicans desperate to justify the Iraq war in the face of recent evidence; as one intelligence expert pointed out "It looks like an effort to discover a retrospective justification for the war in Iraq." (see the LATimes article). The right wing blogosphere already has its underwear in a bunch about this though - with absurd readings of several documents they are claiming these documents prove everything from WMD to Saddam being behind 9-11. Several sites were really up in arms about one document in particular that they thought was a secret Iraqi Intelligence manual, but actually turned out to be a printout of a web page in English by the Federation of American Scientists from 1997 (the page has the FAS logo and everything on it). It's all pretty silly, actually.
A good thing too, IMHO because it is very difficult to be objective. One man's good is another man's bad: Is a mission school in 3rd world Africa really doing Good by helping educate the kids or is it doing Bad by helping to crush cultural diversity?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Right, so now the US government is counting on all those unemployed people with the translation skills who are sitting around reading blogs rather than applying for those government jobs? Let's consider the more likely scenario - this is a dump of documents of little intelligence value whatsoever that they're throwing at the public thanks to pressure from certain political forces who are hoping to cherry pick these documents for "evidence" that Bush was right all along about Saddam's WMD.
What they have wrought is a culture where corporations can attempt to get the equivalent of "street cred" by paying lip service to free and open code. The best example I can think of is everybody's favorite monopoly. What the "Open Source" campaign showed Microsoft is that you can re-brand someone else's idea but suit it to advance something completely different. For more on this subject, see the novel 1984.
But most importantly, Linus Torvalds has nothing to do with "Open Source". It is also important to note that he originally released Linux under a license that did not allow any selling of the software, not even for cost of media (floppies, etc). Some of you might reply to this by pointing out that he often publicly disagrees with Stallman over some issues. This is a red herring, as Torvalds himself often then follows this up by saying "but I'm just a kernel hacker".
All your base are belong to us.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I wonder, did the moderator actually read the LATimes article I linked? Or any articles about this, for that matter? I'm not saying anything all that controversial, to be honest; it's pretty well known who was behind the push to publish these documents on the web. Ah well, I suppose there are many people who get mod points and automatically mod down anything that makes their political party look bad, whether it's left or right...
They're looking for qualified recruits dor service in the middle east.
The random lotto that use to have blak guys win surprisingly more often compared to other random draws will now pick the fine contributors to this little social experiment. Ah, lady luck, how you jest!
You can't take the sky from me...
No, that was just more spin from Condi Rice.
What they are hoping for is people like you, aka morons,And one "moron" like reporter (666905) raising interesting questions is worth a thousand anonymous cowards regurgitating the government party line.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
Ohw it's not that hard to translate these documents from arabic, one of the letters says clearly:
"Hello this is Saddam. They will forge some evidence. But eventually videos caught by hidden camera's will show that Bush was taking a geography exam. He tried to find Korea. Everytime his teacher said "weapons of mass destruction" he points with a stick to the map, but wrongly. Out of frustration he would say "bring them some freedom anyway".
But some else amazes me the most, he has a talent for working the twig.
PS Bushes psychological warfare will not help. All rogue states know he is lousy in geography."
The name Sibel Edmonds ring a bell? That's what the fascist government (who let 9-11 go down for political gain, that's right, there are serious lying murderous traitors in charge now) does with translators when they find out something they aren't supposed to. Check out her case.
This is what they do with their own cops when they get an inkling of what is really happening and try to actually do their jobs.
This is how a high level former prosecutor was treated when he tried to warn the government about an upcoming terror attack that he got wind of.
There's a TON more out there, I mean a TON. Freeking pages and pages of it.
I don't know what's up with this translation business, all I suspect is that there's a scam involved somehow given their track record so far. If it has *anything* to do with 9-11, terror, the mideast, etc, it's a big fat whopper lie. It's all about power, money, installing a police state full bore in the US, dominating the oil regions, advanced lucrative arms sales and whatnot. Haliburton and blackwatch welfare checks.
No one would have any way to even tell if the so called documents they put up to translate are legit documents or more psych warfare big fat lies bullcrap. We *know* they are engaging in extensive media manipulations, we know they lied and lied again about what really happened on 9-11, and they lied about iraq.
At a minimum, they could find out who's a good translator or not so they could pick them up sometime and "detain" them.
The Gov makes fake intelligence all the time. Now they can have it translated by 'open source' geeks to give their fake intelligence the appearance of being more credible.
...and that term is "astroturfing." Come on, if gay linguists already in the military are judged too unreliable for the task, is anyone going to believe that what they're looking for is helpful strangers from the internet to do translation? Nonsense.
It seems a lot more likely that the documents they ARE seeking "translations" for are pieces cherry-picked because they say what the Pentagon wants to hear, or simply forgeries. The whole goal of this thing is, transparently, to put this so-called "evidence" in the hands of bloggers who will be happy to infect the so-called "blogosphere" with whatever message the Pentagon wants them to spread.
Sure, it sounds far-fetched, but it makes perfect sense; if someone had told you a year ago that the government was eavesdropping on people without any checks or balances -- not even the rubber-stamping body that is FISA -- people would have said *that* was far-fetched.
My sig is too lon
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
What about the ~55 million that died during WWII because of statists like Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo? Any ideology that supports a high concentration of power is dangerous to the common man. Don't forget that Communism's Little Black Book estimates that communism during the 20th century killed ~90 million people. This figure obviously overlaps the WWII estimate, but still, power hungry rulers are the threat. Kill the Dictators-Save the Children
Since nobody seems to have anything other than the usual paranoid theories, perhaps some facts are in order.
This stash of documents (tens of thousands) had been in government possession for a long time. It was also indexed.
A writer (Stephen Hays) at The Weekly Standard has been running a campaign to have them released to the public. At one time, the government was planning on destroying them.
Then, ( congresscritters) asked that they be released, and after some fussing, the release was agreed to.
The idea to release the documents onto the internet is brilliant. It is, in fact, the government recognizing the "Army of Davids" concept and using it. Since the Bush administration has demonstrated almost a total lack of ability to defend itself against even the most ludicrous of charges, this represents a rare instance where they have done something smart - put out the raw source material and let anyone on the internet translate and interpret it - with blogspace functioning as quality control if controversial documents are found (such as a couple already translated showing ties (fairly weak) between the Saddam regime and Al Qaeda.
One would hope that the internet and blogger community would welcome this for what it is: the US government recognizing the power of blogspace and the net, unorganized and ad hoc, to do useful information processing. Also, importantly, one would expect the openness shown here to be applauded - the "cursory readings" are hardly enough to ferret out all documents that might be either damaging or helpful to the administration.
The only good weather is bad weather.
The story is odd because it doesn't mention the National Virtual Translation Center http://www.nvtc.gov/index.html, which serves a similar mission, although in a more structured format.
Your post is odd because you suggest top-notch [Arabic] translators are recent graduates. Perhaps junior translators, but for a language like Arabic, even that is pushing it. Good translators take a while to grow.
And you should look at where that two trillion goes with respect to Arabic language education. Consider, for instance, the National Middle East Language Resource Center http://nmelrc.org/ which "undertakes and supports projects such as teacher training, materials development, testing and assessment, integration of pedagogy and technology, study abroad, and K-12 programs" for critical ME languages such as Arabic. They are underfunded by the underfunded Dept of Education, and see hardly a trickle of that huge $2T.
Those universities with good Arabic programs have been oversubscribed for years. There are consistently more students than can be accomodated. And yet those same departments suffer budget cuts and are forced to shrink rather than expand.
When it comes to fielding more Arabic language expertise, I'd say the USA is in dire need of a "deft ploy" by the American government.
"the same open source principle"
Well the open source principles that created linux were trust, respect, mutual interest and healthy debate, as well as the donation of time and expertise.
Simply picking out the economic aspects - donation: time, expertise - does not make this venture similar to linux. Nor would it make the US Military similar to Medicines sans frontieres, an equally invalid comparison.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security - Ben Franklin
I will never translate this for invader stealing iraqi's oil ...
he same open source principle'
Yeah, right. Open source software development is seen by many as the enemy, but when they want to get people working for them for free, then open source suddenly becomes the friend. In FOSS development people make software openly, create it, and give it to the people (to use, to modify, etc.), for everybody's use and benefit. This is hardly the case here.
I see no problem if they seek volunteers for free translations. But don't come up with such silly comparisons.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
RVIT!
(ridens volvendo in terra)
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
I really hate how Richard Stallman and the FSF have hijacked the Free Software and Open Systems movement and attempted to mold it into what they see as ideal. But perhaps I'm reading their intentions incorrectly. If all they wanted to do was create a buzzword that would get misused and misquoted, they've succeeded. Seriously, there was a free software and open systems (which is not quite the same as open source, and definitely not the same as the FSF's idea of free software) movement before the GNU Manifesto, and the FSF used all the same Embrace and Extend techniques the Microsoft does to co-opt it. GCC was made deliberately incompatible with the C standard, with extensions that didn't actually provide new functionality... they just guaranteed that software written for GCC wouldn't compile on competing freely distributable compilers.
What they have done is show how you can give away your source code and still retain effective control over it, and use the resulting street cred to co-opt the work of thousands of developers who thought that by using the GPL they were "simply sharing their code". He's at least as responsible for the current confusion as Raymond.
Eric Raymond's got some really messed up ideas, too, and I agree that he's further muddied the waters... but Stallman's hardly innocent of stirring the pot himself.
I know you were kidding, and I hope I don't offend any English speakers, but IMHO Arabic is a much better language than English in terms of structure( I mean even English linguists speak about how English grammar is very inconsistent. None of that in Arabic).
Also, Arabic sentences are usually very succint and can tell a lot with only a few words.
For example, look at those two sentences which have the same meaning
--
Arabic: Kam Kelma Ahtagoha letawseel al-m'ana?
English: How many words do I need to deliver the meaning?
--
It took twice the words to say the same sentence in English!
(Of course, I'm a native Arabic speaker so I'm very biased, but still)
but I think I finally translated one...
Dear Friend,
I am a senior citizen.
During the Clinton Administration I had a good job, a good family, a good life. Since President Bush took office, it's gone to hell. And he's to blame!
I lost my job.
I lost my health insurance.
I lost my house.
Then, he stole my two sons in that terrible War in Iraq. My own two sons, my life!!! I have nothing else!
We should do anything that Senators Kennedy, Clinton, and Kerry want to insure that a Democrat is back in the White House with the next election.
Sincerely,
Saddam Hussein
-- this space for rent --
The US government has most definitely been trying hard to hire qualified people with these skills and it pays extremely well if you have them. Sure, it sounds stupid. Look at the open job recs at NSA and CIA. It's all there. But you'd rather be a conspiracy theorist. Watch out for those black helos. They really are out there.
Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
that read that as Open Source Transition? I was like cool they want to change to open source. But no they just want to use the public to translate documents. Boring.
Charles Wyble System Engineer
I'd forgot that the term Open Source was also used in the intelligence community. Well spotted.
Dude this isn't a conspiracy. It's all in the open. Rep Hoekstra has been pressuring for the release of these documents for months. The ODNI has already gone through them and determined there is little of value there. Read the newspapers. I'm not making this up, nor am I getting it out of some conspiracy theory websites. It's in the freakin' New York Times. As you said -- "It's all there." I wasn't suggesting that the gov't had plenty of good translators; what I was suggesting is that they aren't going to trust random bloggers to do their work for them.
If, in 2002, the government had stopped spending money on the "missle defense shield" and put even 1% of that money into training Arabic translators, then this stupid psy-ops trick wouldn't have any real weight.
[o]_O
Like a translator would work for $2.
Why not, there are ones that will work for free. Isn't that the whole point of this?
From TFA:
When the US government on Thursday began publishing captured Iraqi government documents on the Internet, Shahda eagerly began to translate the files into English and publish them on a conservative website.
"I feel a sense of duty," said Shahda, a native of Lebanon who supports President Bush's decision to invade Iraq. "I think it's a duty for people who know Arabic to translate the documents."
He's not getting paid.
Coalition forces have collected millions of documents from the former Iraqi regime. After intelligence analysts give them a cursory reading, they determine if they contain actionable intelligence. If so, they're translated and the information is disseminated to higher authorities, otherwise they're archived. Since there is such a huge number of documents, it's likely many of them would never get translated or released without a program like this. It's not perfect, but at least it's a step in the right direction.
You forgot to mention "Gettysburg" 51,112!
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Please don't forget that he had them and used them. It's what's unknown is whether he still had some prior to the invasion.
Since there is now evidence that he had detailed intel about the invasion - it lies easily within the realm of possiblity that he arranged to have his remaining stockpiles moved out of the country. There is now some indication that Russian troops were involved in moving weapons to Syria (though only conventional weapons are mentioned).