Stop Giving Gay Translators the Boot

The WashPo reports this morning on how the Pentagon, in trying to work around a shortage of Arabic translators, is spending millions to develop a device, so far unsuccessful, to translate Arabic:

An Annapolis firm, VoxTec International Inc., developed the device and said it has steadily made improvements. But the goal of having a machine replace a human interpreter remains elusive, and the military is mounting a multimillion-dollar campaign to find a more capable successor, one that can translate both sides of a conversation, from English to Arabic and vice versa.

In practice it sounds like a Saturday Night Live sketch:

"You say 'house search' and then it will say in Arabic: 'We're here to search your house. Please stay in this room. Do you have any weapons?'" said Tim McCune, the company's president.

Why not have it translate, "Hi, how are you?" into, "Hey, are you a terrorist?"

Of course, the shortage of translators wouldn't be as acute if the military would stop discharging translators because they are gay.

According to the New Republic:

Between 1998 and 2004, the military discharged 20 Arabic and six Farsi language speakers under the "don't ask, don't tell" policy. The new data are not broken down by year, but additional figures from other reports suggest that about half the Arabic discharges came after September 11.

Tell me again. Why aren't we winning in Iraq?