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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."
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 can translate the subject: "Operation Iraqi Freedom".
"Operation Iraqi Bloodshed & Expropriation of US Tax Dollars by Military-Industrial Complex"
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.
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.