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2010-02-19 Home Front: WoT

Five Muslim Soldiers Arrested at Fort Jackson in South Carolina

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Posted by tipper 2010-02-19 08:41|| || Front Page|| [4 views ] Top

#1 Fox news

Posted by tipper 2010-02-19 08:49|| 2010-02-19 08:49|| Front Page Top

#2 I went to BCT there.

Posted by GirlThursday 2010-02-19 09:14|| 2010-02-19 09:14|| Front Page Top

#3 Difficult to say what is taking place at Jackson. A drill sergeant in a training brigade would probably be the one to ask to get the straight skinny. Definately appears to be some smoke in the Teepee.

Posted by Besoeker 2010-02-19 09:18|| 2010-02-19 09:18|| Front Page Top

#4 Yup. The question is whether it's from a real fire or if someone lit a crumpled paper and held it up near the fire alarm.

Posted by lotp 2010-02-19 09:38|| 2010-02-19 09:38|| Front Page Top

#5 As an aside, post commanders can be much like enraged grizzly bears when they feel their post is threatened, and a previous assignment for the current post commander was as commander, 2 ACR.

Cav types can get right testy when teased or annoyed.

Posted by Anonymoose 2010-02-19 09:43|| 2010-02-19 09:43|| Front Page Top

#6 I keep wondering how long it would have taken to train non-Muslim, native-born translators of Arabic that wouldn't be such security risks. Apparently the USA is bent upon the insecure route.

Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2010-02-19 09:45|| 2010-02-19 09:45|| Front Page Top

#7 I keep wondering how long it would have taken to train non-Muslim, native-born translators of Arabic that wouldn't be such security risks.

There are plenty of Arab Christians who can teach good Arabic and wouldn't be security risks. They cannot teach the dos and dont's in company of Muslims but there are retired diplomats or CIA people who can. So no need to hire Muslims like having Nazis teach German during WWII hanging around.

Posted by JFM 2010-02-19 10:58|| 2010-02-19 10:58|| Front Page Top

#8 JFM, I see your point but the Nazi connection is overdone. Its not as if we are using known Al Queda folks. It is more like getting Austrians to teach German. No idea if they are Nazi's or not. No idea if they support their fellow Austrian in his World Domination plans or not.

Posted by rjschwarz 2010-02-19 11:08|| 2010-02-19 11:08|| Front Page Top

#9 IIUC one issue with training Arabic translators is that the language is fundamentally poetic in nature compared to most European langauges. It evokes rather than denotes and to evoke meaning requires that the hearer have a substantial shared frame of reference.

There are a relatively small number of 3 consonant word stems from which the vocabulary is built up. Word meanings build on one another through a lot of metaphor and indirect reference. This includes indirect evocation of books, famous speeches and themes from music etc.

So to get at what a Friday preacher is really communicating, say, or a jihadi website, requires more than the ability to literally translate words and grammar in a linear fashion. It requires a fair degree of cultural immersion.

There's also the problem of many dialects, some of which are mutually unintelligible, vs. standard arabic which most educated speakers can use - but don't need to use if they want their meaning to be harder to discern by outsiders.

Much bigger problem than training, say, Russian translators even though Russian grammar and word forms are very complex compared to English.

Posted by lotp 2010-02-19 11:19|| 2010-02-19 11:19|| Front Page Top

#10 Fascinating, lotp!

I recently did some work on automated Arabic to English translation using NLP techniques and Markov chains. I'm not sure if the program was working or not because everything came out as "Kill the Jews!"

Posted by SteveS 2010-02-19 11:38|| 2010-02-19 11:38|| Front Page Top

#11 the language is fundamentally poetic in nature compared to most European langauges. It evokes rather than denotes and to evoke meaning requires that the hearer have a substantial shared frame of reference

That sounds like a Star Trek TNG episode -- the one where the aliens only spoke in metaphors that referred to their epic poems. (Always wondered how in the heck such folks could could be specific enough to build a spacecraft and travel the galaxy. Kind of explains the Arabs, though...)

Posted by Gabby 2010-02-19 11:49|| 2010-02-19 11:49|| Front Page Top

#12 The problem with statistical NLP is always the training corpus, SteveS ....

Posted by lotp 2010-02-19 11:56|| 2010-02-19 11:56|| Front Page Top

#13 Its not as if we are using known Al Queda folks. It is more like getting Austrians to teach German.

Nope. Eisenhower and the main designer of the Mustang were of German ascent. In WWI a soldier who had been approved for the Medal of Honor revealed his real name: not Smith but Schmidt.

But here we are talking of peole who share at least part of Al Quaida's ideology. Say that it was like admitting Moderate Nazis in the Armed Forces.

Posted by JFM 2010-02-19 14:01|| 2010-02-19 14:01|| Front Page Top

#14 "The Jackson Five". Gosh how I long for the old days...

Posted by ~~War On Terror~~ 2010-02-19 14:55|| 2010-02-19 14:55|| Front Page Top

#15 the language is fundamentally poetic in nature compared to most European langauges. It evokes rather than denotes and to evoke meaning requires that the hearer have a substantial shared frame of reference

That sounds like a Star Trek TNG episode -- the one where the aliens only spoke in metaphors that referred to their epic poems. (Always wondered how in the heck such folks could could be specific enough to build a spacecraft and travel the galaxy. Kind of explains the Arabs, though...)

Darmok And Jalad At Tanagra.

Mafia, at Rantburg. The things I learn when the walls fell.

Posted by Mizzou Mafia 2010-02-19 18:16|| 2010-02-19 18:16|| Front Page Top

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