Como parte dos planos de expansão da empresa para 2010, a Paprika agora conta com uma base em São Paulo, maior mercado do Brasil.
O escritório funciona na Alameda Santos, pertinho da Av. Paulista. A ideia é estarmos mais próximos dos nossos clientes da região Sudeste e gerar muitos, muitos novos negócios!
Mais novidades em breve.
O Centro Universitário Ibero-Americano (UNIBERO) promoverá o V CONGRESSO IBERO-AMERICANO DE TRADUÇÃO E INTERPRETAÇÃO, enfocando o tema "Tradução e Interpretação: (des)construindo Babel". A Paprika estará presente no evento, que ocorrerá de 17 a 20 de maio de 2010.
Numa época em que o sucesso das negociações político-econômicas, bem como da integração cultural entre os países, dependem primordialmente da rapidez e da eficácia com que as informações são transmitidas e corretamente compreendidas, tanto o tradutor quanto o intérprete despontam, no cenário mundial, como detentores de uma função decisiva no processo atual de interação entre diversos povos. Isso justifica a necessidade de eventos como o CIATI, que pode contribuir para uma ampla discussão teórica e prática sobre tradução e interpretação, buscando o enriquecimento e a valorização do profissional da área.
O CIATI – Congresso Internacional de Tradução e Interpretação, realizado a cada três anos desde 1998, trouxe, além de participantes de todo o Brasil, palestrantes dos seguintes países: África do Sul, Argentina, Canadá, Dinamarca, Escócia, Espanha, Estados Unidos, Grécia, Índia, Inglaterra, Irlanda, Itália, Luxemburgo, Malásia, México, Peru, Portugal, Trinidad e Tobago, Uruguai, Venezuela, entre outros.
Os temas propostos nos quatro congressos anteriormente realizados foram:
I CIATI: "Tradução, Interpretação e Cultura na Era da Globalização" (de 11 a 14 de maio de 1998);
II CIATI: "2001: uma odisseia na tradução" (de 14 a 17 de maio de 2001);
III CIATI: "Novos Tempos, Velha Arte: Tradução, Tecnologia, Talento" (de 10 a 13 de maio de 2004);
IV CIATI: "O Processo da Tradução: uma história sem fim" (de 14 a 17 de maio de 2007).
Mais informações: http://www.unibero.edu.br/vciati/index.html
A iniciativa é da Paprika, estúdio de tradução local.
Um mercado internacionalizado exige o surgimento de um profissional com bom domínio de idiomas estrangeiros, capaz de amenizar as barreiras de entendimento entre as línguas - o tradutor. A tarefa não é fácil e exige constante estudo e qualificação. No Nordeste, entretanto, a busca por uma maior capacitação pode ser frustrada e desestimular o interessado na área, já que a oferta de cursos é bastante reduzida. Pensando nesse problema, o estúdio de tradução Paprika, sediado no Recife, oferece pelo segundo ano consecutivo um curso de formação de tradutores, ao longo do mês de março.
O material apresentado pela professora e diretora da Paprika, Gabriela d'Avila, irá reunir a teoria e a prática de maneira dinâmica e original - além de aulas expositivas, o curso também contará com exibições de filmes, leituras comparativas de textos em diversas áreas, revistas, capítulos de livros e documentos de órgãos internacionais. A iniciativa, que promete repetir o sucesso da primeira edição, não pretende apenas aprimorar a técnica do profissional, como também busca refletir a própria prática da tradução.
O curso será realizado em 12 encontros, num total de 36h, no Salão Fragatta do Cult Hotel, em Boa Viagem. Estão sendo oferecidas 30 vagas, podendo participar estudantes de graduação, pós-graduação e profissionais interessados na carreira de tradutor. A única exigência é que os candidatos tenham bom conhecimento de pelo menos uma língua estrangeira. O investimento é de R$568,00 à vista, que pode ser dividido em duas parcelas de R$299,00. As aulas acontecerão nos seguintes horários: terças e quintas, das 19h às 22h; e aos sábados das 9h às 12h. Ao final do curso, os alunos receberão certificado.
SOBRE A PROFESSORA: As aulas serão ministradas pela diretora da Paprika, Gabriela d’Avila. Ela é pós-graduada em Tradução pela Unibero/SP e é membro da American Translators Association (ATA). Também possui Certificate of Proficiency in English (Cambridge) e Diploma Superior de Español como Lengua Extranjera (Universidad de Salamanca). Já trabalhou em mais de 150 projetos de tradução e revisão para clientes de grande porte. Atualmente, é tradutora do jornal americano The New York Times.
SOBRE A PAPRIKA – Sediada em Recife, a Paprika é uma empresa especializada em tradução de 14 idiomas: inglês, português, espanhol, francês, alemão, italiano, hebraico, árabe, russo, chinês, japonês, norueguês, holandês e sueco. Entre os clientes da empresa, que tem cerca de dois anos no mercado, estão The New York Times, Greenpeace, Samsung, Camará Filmes, Baterias Moura, Empetur, Governo do Estado de Pernambuco, etc.
SERVIÇO
Curso de Formação de Tradutores
Quando: 2 a 27 de março de 2010
Terças e quintas, das 19h às 22h | Sábados, das 9h às 12h
Local: Cult Hotel
Salão Fragatta – Av. Conselheiro Aguiar, 755, Boa Viagem – Tel. 2123 2777
Quanto: R$ 568 (à vista) ou duas parcelas de R$ 299
Informações: 3088.3911 - 9633.1816 - 8841.3080
Artistas do Nordeste investem na realização de DVDs com legendas
Sucesso absoluto nas ruas de todo o Brasil, tradicionais ritmos do Nordeste investem na divulgação em outros países. No mês de março, será lançado o novo DVD de Alcymar Monteiro. Com o título Tradição e Tradução, o material foi gravado no dia 26 de setembro de 2009, durante um show do cantor no Marco Zero. Cerca de 30 mil pessoas prestigiaram a apresentação. O DVD terá legendas em inglês e espanhol produzidas pela Paprika, empresa de tradução de Gabriela d'Avila, sediada no Recife.
A ideia de Alcymar Monteiro de legendar o DVD em inglês e espanhol surgiu como uma forma de divulgar sua música para estrangeiros. O ritmo de Alcymar tem forte apelo no exterior e o cantor já se apresentou até no prestigiado festival de Montreux, na Suíça. De acordo com o empresário do cantor Antônio Monteiro Júnior, é uma excelente oportunidade para dar mais visibilidade aos trabalhos realizados no Brasil. "Procuramos empresa de tradução no Nordeste, mas não encontramos. Vi uma reportagem em um site falando sobre a Paprika e o serviço de tradução que o estúdio faz para o The New York Times. Entrei em contato com eles e consegui as legendas do DVD. Estamos otimistas com a divulgação do DVD no Brasil e lá fora. Vai ser um sucesso", disse.
O DVD de Alcymar Monteiro homenageia a música tradicional nordestina, fazendo uma releitura atualizada dos ritmos e manifestações típicas. Entre as participações do show, destaca-se a de Lia de Itamaracá. Seguidor de Luiz Gonzaga e Jackson do Pandeiro, Alcymar não mede esforços para valorizar o forró verdadeiro. Este é o segundo DVD do cantor, que deixa claro seu apego às manifestações populares do Nordeste.
In depicting the emergence of the world’s languages as a curse of gibberish, the biblical tale of the Tower of Babel makes us moderns smile. Yet, considering the headache that 6,000 languages can induce in real life, the story makes a certain sense.
Not long ago, 33 of the FBI’s 12,000 employees spoke Arabic, as did 6 of the 1,000 employees at the American Embassy in Iraq. How can we significantly improve that situation is a good question. It’s hard to learn Arabic, and not only because it’s hard to pick up any new language. Iraqi Arabic is actually one of several “dialects” of Arabic that is as different from the others as one Romance language is from another. Using Iraqi Arabic even in a country as close as Egypt would be like sitting down at a trattoria in Milan and ordering lunch in Portuguese.
Bookstore shelves groan under the weight of countless foreign-language self-teaching sets that are about as useful as the tonics and elixirs that passed as medicine a century ago and leave their students with anemic vocabularies and paltry grammar that are of little use in real conversation.
Even with good instruction, it is fiendishly difficult to learn any new language well, at least after about the age of 15. While vilified in certain quarters as threatening the future of the English language in America, most immigrants who actually try to improve their English skills here in the United States find that they have trouble communicating effectively even with doctors or their children’s schoolteachers.
Yet the going idea among linguists and anthropologists is that we must keep as many languages alive as possible, and that the death of each one is another step on a treadmill toward humankind’s cultural oblivion. This accounted for the melancholy tone, for example, of the obituaries for the Eyak language of southern Alaska last year when its last speaker died.
That death did mean, to be sure, that no one will again use the word demexch, which refers to a soft spot in the ice where it is good to fish. Never again will we hear the word 'ał for an evergreen branch, a word whose final sound is a whistling past the sides of the tongue that sounds like wind passing through just such a branch. And behind this small death is a larger context. Linguistic death is proceeding more rapidly even than species attrition. According to one estimate, a hundred years from now the 6,000 languages in use today will likely dwindle to 600. The question, though, is whether this is a problem.
As someone who has taught himself languages as a hobby since childhood and is an academic linguist, I hardly rejoice when a language dies. Other languages can put concepts together in ways that make them more fascinatingly different from English than most of us are aware they can be. In the Berik language in New Guinea, for example, verbs have to mark the sex of the person you are affecting, the size of the object you are wielding, and whether it is light outside. (Kitobana means “gives three large objects to a male in the sunlight.”) Berik is doing fine for now, but is probably one of the languages we won’t see around in 2109.
Assuming that we can keep 6,000 languages alive is the rough equivalent of supposing that we can stop, say, ice from developing soft spots. Here’s why. As people speaking indigenous languages migrate to cities, inevitably they learn globally dominant languages like English and use them in their interactions with one another. The immigrants’ children may use their parents’ indigenous languages at home. But they never know those languages as part of their public life, and will therefore be more comfortable with the official language of the world they grow up in. For the most part, they will speak this language to their own children. These children will not know the indigenous languages of their grandparents, and thus pretty soon they will not be spoken. This is language death.
Many scholars hope that we can turn back the tide with programs to revive indigenous languages, but the sad fact is that this will almost never be very effective. Learning small indigenous languages tends to be a tough business for people raised in European languages: they tend to be more like Berik than like French.
I saw what this meant when I was assigned to teach some Native Americans their ancestral language. Filled with sounds it’s hard to make unless you were born to them, it seemed almost designed to frustrate someone who grew up with English.
In the Central Pomo language of California, if one person sits, the word is—get ready—'cˇháw. The mark at the beginning signifies a catch in the throat, and what the raised little h requires shall not detain us here, but rest assured that it’s a distinct challenge to render if you grew up speaking English. But if more than one person sits, it’s a different word, naphów. If it’s liquid that is sitting, as in a container, then the word is cˇóm. The whole language is like this.
Yes, there is the success story of Hebrew, but that unlikely revival came about because of a happenstantial confluence of religion, the birth of a nation, and the obsession of Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, who settled in Palestine and insisted on speaking only Hebrew to all Jews. This extended to reducing his wife to tears when he caught her singing a lullaby to their child in her native Russian.
Few people not involved with nation building would be inclined to such a violent dedication to learning a new language, as is proven by the merely genuflective level of Hebrew that American Jews today typically master in Hebrew school. It also helped Hebrew’s successful comeback that it had a long tradition of written materials. Only about 200 languages are truly written: most are only spoken.
What makes the potential death of a language all the more emotionally charged is the belief that if a language dies, a cultural worldview will die with it. But this idea is fragile. Certainly language is a key aspect of what distinguishes one group from another. However, a language itself does not correspond to the particulars of a culture but to a faceless process that creates new languages as the result of geographical separation. For example, most Americans pronounce disgusting as “diss-kussting” with a k sound. (Try it—you probably do too.) However, some people say “dizz-gusting”—it’s easier to pronounce the g after a softer sound like z. Imagine a language with the word pronounced as it is spelled (and as it was in Latin): “diss-gusting.” The group speaking the language splits into two groups that go their separate ways. Come back five hundred years later, and one group is pronouncing the word “diss-kussting,” while the other is pronouncing it “dizz-gusting.” After even more time, the word would start shortening, just as we pronounce “let us” as “let’s.” After a thousand years, in one place it would be something like “skussting,” while in the other it might be “zgustin.” After another thousand, perhaps “skusty” and “zguss.” By this time, these are no longer even the same language.
This is exactly why there are different languages—what began in Latin as augustus became agosto in Spanish and, in French, août, pronounced as just the single vowel sound. Estonian is what happened when speakers of an earlier language migrated away from other ones; in one place, Estonian happened, in the other, Finnish did. And so while Finnish for horse is hevonen, in Estonian it’s hobune.
Notice that this is not about culture, any more than saying “diss-kusting” rather than “diz-gusting” reflects anything about one’s soul. In fact, all human groups could, somehow, exhibit the exact same culture—and yet their languages would be as different as they are now, because the differences are the result of geographical separation, leading to chance linguistic driftings of the kind that turn augustus into agosto and août. In this we would be like whales, whose species behave similarly everywhere, but have distinct “songs” as the result of happenstance. Who argues that we must preserve each pod of whales because of the particular songs they happen to have developed? The diversity of human languages is subject to the same evaluation: each one is the result of a roll of the dice.
One school of thought proposes that there is more than mere chance in how a language’s words emerge, and that if we look closely we see culture peeping through. For example, in its obituary for Eyak, the Economist proposed that the fact that kultahl meant both leaf and feather signified a cultural appreciation of the unique spiritual relationship of trees and birds. But in English we use hover to refer both to the act of waiting, suspended, in the air and the act of staying close to a mate at a cocktail party to ward off potential rivals. Notice how much less interesting that is to us than the bit about the Eyak and leaves and feathers.
For the better part of a century, all attempts to conjure any meaningful indication of thought patterns or cultural outlook from the vocabularies and
grammars of languages has fallen apart in that sort of way, with researchers picking up only a few isolated shards of evidence. For example, because “table” has feminine gender in Spanish (la mesa), a Spanish speaker is more likely—if pressed—to imagine a cartoon table having a high voice. But this isn’t exactly what most of us would think of as meaningfully “cultural,” nor as having to do with “thought.” And in fact, Spanish speakers do not go about routinely imagining tables as cooing in feminine tones.
Thus the oft-heard claim that the death of a language means the death of a culture puts the cart before the horse. When the culture dies, naturally the language dies along with it. The reverse, however, is not necessarily true. Groups do not find themselves in the bizarre circumstance of having all of their traditional cultural accoutrements in hand only to find themselves incapable of indigenous expression because they no longer speak the corresponding language. Native American groups would bristle at the idea that they are no longer meaningfully “Indian” simply because they no longer speak their ancestral tongue. Note also the obvious and vibrant black American culture in the United States, among people who speak not Yoruba but English.
The main loss when a language dies is not cultural but aesthetic. The click sounds in certain African languages are magnificent to hear. In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information. The Ket language of Siberia is so awesomely irregular as to seem a work of art.
But let’s remember that this aesthetic delight is mainly savored by the outside observer, often a professional savorer like myself. Professional linguists or anthropologists are part of a distinct human minority. Most people, in the West or anywhere else, find the fact that there are so many languages in the world no more interesting than I would find a list of all the makes of Toyota. So our case for preserving the world’s languages cannot be based on how fascinating their variegation appears to a few people in the world. The question is whether there is some urgent benefit to humanity from the fact that some people speak click languages, while others speak Ket or thousands of others, instead of everyone speaking in a universal tongue.
As 5,500 languages slowly disappear, the aesthetic loss is not to be dismissed. And in fact dying languages become museum pieces. For this reason it is fortunate and crucial that modern technology is recording and analyzing them more thoroughly than ever before. Perhaps a future lies before us in which English will be a sort of global tongue while people continue to speak about 600 other languages among themselves. English already is a de facto universal language—yet those who would consider it a blessing if everyone over 15 spoke an artificial language like Esperanto are often somewhat diss-kussted that this is the status English is moving closer toward decade by decade.
Obviously, the discomfort with English “taking over” is due to associations with imperialism, first on the part of the English and then, of course, the American behemoth. We cannot erase from our minds the unsavory aspects of history. Nor should we erase from our minds the fact that countless languages—such as most of the indigenous languages of North America and Australia—have become extinct not because of something as abstract and gradual as globalization, but because of violence, annexation, and cultural extermination. But we cannot change that history, nor is it currently conceivable how we could arrange for some other language to replace the growing universality of English. Like the QWERTY keyboard, this particular horse is out of the barn.
Even if the world’s currencies are someday tied to the renmimbi, English’s head start as the lingua franca of popular culture, scholarship, and international discourse would ensure its linguistic dominance. To change this situation would require a great many centuries, certainly too long a span to figure meaningfully in our assessment of the place of English in world communications in our present moment.
And notice how daunting the prospect of Chinese as a world language is, with a writing system that demands mastery of 2,000 characters in order to be able to read even a tabloid newspaper. For all of its association with Pepsi and the CIA, English is very user-friendly as the world’s 6,000 languages go. English verb conjugation is spare compared to, say, that of Italian—just the third-person singular s in the present, for example. There are no pesky genders to memorize (and no feminine-gendered tables that talk like Penelope Cruz). There are no sounds under whose dispensation you almost have to be born as a prerequisite for rendering them anywhere near properly, like the notorious trilly rˇ sound in Czech.
Each language is hard in its own way. Try explaining to a foreigner why, if you get a busy signal, you might say, “I’ll try her tomorrow,” but you can also say, “Tomorrow I turn 25,” without using the will to indicate the future. But as a language all people are required to learn, would it really be better to have one like Russian, with three genders, fiercely subtle and irregular verb marking, and numbers so hard to express properly that Russians themselves have trouble with them?
There are those who worry not only that English will become primus inter pares, but that it will finally eat up even the last remaining 600 languages as well. But this stretches the imagination, to be sure. As long as there are Japanese people meeting and raising children in Japan, amidst a culture in which Japanese
is enshrined as the language of not only speech but education, literature, and journalism, it is hard to conceive even of the first step toward the day when a child raised in Osaka would speak English and think of Japanese as a language his parents spoke when they “didn’t want me to understand.” Eyak is one thing, but the languages spoken by substantial populations and well entrenched in writing are another.
However, as is increasingly clear today, under the terms of the present order we must prepare for unforeseen circumstances and treat the surprising as
normal. Suppose global warming patterns forced population relocations of unprecedented volume and speed: perhaps this could lead to the use of English as a lingua franca among displaced hordes of assorted extractions, such that children raised in these new settings would speak English instead of Finnish or Japanese or Croatian.
Or just maybe the process could happen as the result of some less dramatic and more gradual process. We might conceive of humanity continuing to benefit from the extinct 600 languages as taught ones. People could savor Tolstoy in the original Russian as we today read Virgil in Latin.
Viscerally, as a great fan of Russian for many years, I am as uncomfortable as anyone else with the prospect of Russian no longer being passed on to children. However, I am also aware that mine is not necessarily a logical discomfort. Coming back to the Tower of Babel, can we say that the benefits of linguistic diversity are more important, in a way that a representative number of humans could agree upon, than the impediment to communication that they entail? Especially when their differentiation from one another is, ultimately, a product of the same kind of accretionary accidents that distinguish a woodchuck from a groundhog?
At the end of the day, language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. Globalization means hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space. For them to do so and still maintain distinct languages across generations happens only amidst unusually tenacious self-isolation—such as that of the Amish—or brutal segregation. (Jews did not speak Yiddish in order to revel in their diversity but because they lived in an apartheid society.) Crucially, it is black Americans, the Americans whose English is most distinct from that of the mainstream, who are the ones most likely to live separately from whites geographically and spiritually.
The alternative, it would seem, is indigenous groups left to live in isolation—complete with the maltreatment of women and lack of access to modern medicine and technology typical of such societies. Few could countenance this as morally justified, and attempts to find some happy medium in such cases are frustrated by the simple fact that such peoples, upon exposure to the West, tend to seek membership in it.
As we assess our linguistic future as a species, a basic question remains. Would it be inherently evil if there were not 6,000 spoken languages but one? We must consider the question in its pure, logical essence, apart from particular associations with English and its history. Notice, for example, how the discomfort with the prospect in itself eases when you imagine the world’s language being, say, Eyak.
Using English straplines in foreign climes may seem counterproductive but, even if the words don't make sense, the message can be very clear.
The globalised world of today needs a global language. In English, it has found that language.
Advertisers have embraced this phenomenon enthusiastically. Many brands now choose to leave key elements of their advertising in English all over the world. The language of Shakespeare and Johnson is now the language of straplines and banners.
But what effect does using an English strapline in a non-English speaking market have? Is it a slap in the face for local culture? Or proof that the advertiser is slap-bang up to date with the networked world of tomorrow?
Does it get people talking about the brand (in whatever language)? Or is it met with incomprehension and indifference?
You have probably spotted from the byline that the creative translation of advertising is our business, so we have a vested interest in the answer to these questions. If we say that local-language adaptations are always more effective, you will think: "Well, they would say that, wouldn't they?"
But, in fact, we wouldn't always say this. Our business is about making specific ads work in specific local cultures. A generalisation such as "foreign language good, English bad" is not very helpful. Often, an English strapline is used because it is seen as the language of the developed world. For example, in former communist countries such as Russia, Western goods have long been seen as superior in quality to domestic alternatives.
In such markets, the mere fact that a brand's strapline is in English sends out a message in itself: exclusivity, quality, snob value. This is the same approach made famous by Audi in the UK. People may not understand what Vorsprung durch Technik means, but they understand that when it comes to automotive engineering, those Germans know their Zwiebeln.
The global English strapline is therefore a popular choice among high-end luxury brands. It should also be pointed out that, in emerging markets, such brands generally aim at the affluent, educated elite - the very people who are most likely to speak English. So the approach is not without its merits.
On the other hand, if the use of English is, in itself, part of the brand message, the law of diminishing returns is obviously at work. If everyone advertises in English to set themselves apart, it ceases to be very differentiating.
Another reason a brand may use an English strapline is that the line in question is deemed "untranslatable". There are countless cases such as this, from Mazda's "zoom zoom" in Russia to Johnnie Walker's "keep walking" in Turkey and Greece.
But just because a line cannot be translated, it does not follow that the brief cannot be solved in other languages. Moreover, if the idea is so specific to the English language that it cannot be translated, then it is also likely that it cannot be fully grasped by non-native speakers of English.
Even in countries where people generally have an excellent command of English, they don't use English in the same way that native speakers do. And standards of English vary greatly around the world. Education is part of this. The effect of (American) English's cultural dominance is another.
In small TV and film markets, it is not worth the expense of dubbing English-language programming into the local language, so it is subtitled instead. As a result, in countries such as Norway and Israel, those endless Friends repeats are free English lessons.
This gives rise to the interesting phenomenon of advertisers using English straplines written by local copywriters. A good example of this would be the Orange strapline from Israel, "have an Orange day", which caught on to the extent that it entered popular slang. Young Israelis sometimes say "have an Orange day" (in Hebrew) as a way of saying goodbye - even though the literal translation makes no sense.
On the other hand, the pitfalls are shown by Jaguar's attempt to crack the German market with the Delphic strapline: "Life by gorgeous." This proved as incomprehensible to Germans as it is to native English speakers.
One can appreciate why, in the fatherland of BMW and Mercedes, Jaguar's British heritage might be an important (and differentiating) element of its brand equity. But if nobody can understand the ad, nobody will understand why they should buy a Jag.
In fact, there is research to suggest that only 15 to 20 per cent of German consumers fully understand the English advertising they are exposed to.
There is also some anecdotal evidence to suggest that as the stock of free-market capitalism has fallen since the credit crunch, English may have lost some of its lustre for advertisers - though, of course, we should be wary of mistaking short-term reactions for long-term trends.
From speaking to our copywriters around the world, it is clear that consumers are used to seeing English in advertising. If the campaign is memorable, but the strapline is not well understood, people simply ignore it and focus on the bits that they do get. You are not going to damage your brand by using an English strapline. It does not disturb, annoy or offend consumers.
It is, as discussed, a convenient short-hand for the internationalism and modernity of a brand. And it offers benefits such as reduced costs and a guaranteed minimum level of brand consistency - it is a safe choice. But, while safe choices offer less risk, the possible rewards are also often lower.
A good strapline should encapsulate the essence of the entire brand. They should be the hardest-working words in the whole campaign. But if it was not created in the target audience's own culture, there is a good chance it will convey a generic, unnuanced message, or no message at all.
The English language is now part, but only a part, of the cultural landscape all around the world. As such, it is one, but only one, of the many weapons in a local copywriter's arsenal.
So an English strapline may sometimes be the right option for a foreign market. But it should never be a default option.
(Via Campaign)
Layout de Charles Assis.
WASHINGTON — The F.B.I.’s collection of wiretapped phone calls and intercepted e-mail has been soaring in recent years, but the bureau is failing to review “significant amounts” of such material partly for lack of translators, according to a Justice Department report released Monday.
Senator Charles E. Grassley has praised the Federal Bureau of Investigation but said its linguist department was “a big hole.”
“Not reviewing such material increases the risk that the F.B.I. will not detect information in its possession that may be important to its counterterrorism and counterintelligence efforts,” said the report, which was issued by the office of the department’s inspector general, Glenn A. Fine.
In a statement, the Federal Bureau of Investigation said that it was working to reduce its backlog of unreviewed audio recordings and electronic documents, and that it continued seeking to hire or contract with more linguists.
“The F.B.I. remains committed to reviewing all foreign language material in a timely manner and setting priorities to ensure that the most important material receives the most immediate attention,” the agency said in a statement.
The government’s ability to review and translate materials quickly has been a subject of concern since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Two previous inspector general reports also faulted the bureau for significant backlogs in reviewing information in other languages.
Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who has pressed the F.B.I. to improve its translation abilities, praised the bureau for its recent arrest of several terrorism suspects inside the United States but said that its linguist department remained “a big hole.”
“Today’s report appears to point to more of the same by the F.B.I. with its translation department,” Mr. Grassley said in a statement. “The F.B.I. needs their feet held to the fire in order to make substantive changes in the translation area.”
The inspector general report consisted largely of numbers — some of which were disputed by the bureau — and did not contain any specific examples of cases in which the bureau failed to detect a potential terrorist as quickly as possible because of a delay in reviewing material.
The report also contains new information about the bureau’s efforts to hire more translators. It showed that the number of the bureau’s linguists — both staff members and contractors — had fallen slightly to 1,298 as of September 2008, from a peak in 2005. It met its hiring targets in 2008 for only 2 of 14 targeted languages.
The process of hiring linguists has been slowed because of lengthy security vetting and competition with other intelligence agencies that are also trying to hire more translators, the report said.
The report did find “significant improvements” in some F.B.I. practices. In particular, for the past three years the bureau has reviewed every text — a fax or paper document — its agents have collected for top-priority counterterrorism investigations.
But the inspector general found that there were backlogs in reviewing audio recordings, including telephone calls, and electronic files, like e-mail messages and Web pages.
The F.B.I. and the inspector general disagreed over how to measure those backlogs. Mr. Fine’s office found that the F.B.I. had failed to review 7.2 million electronic files collected by counterterrorism investigators. Nearly all of that backlog dates from 2008, when the bureau’s intake of such materials for all types of investigations nearly tripled, to 46 million files, the audit said.
But the F.B.I. argued that as the volume of such files had increased, its analysts increasingly used sophisticated computer searches of databases to find high-priority files rather than opening each individual file by hand.
The inspector general report, citing field office reports, also said there might be as many as 47,000 hours of counterterrorism audio recordings that were not reviewed as of September 2008, which would be a more than fivefold increase in the backlog since 2003.
But the F.B.I. argued that the inspector general report was double-counting duplicate recordings. The bureau said that its primary system for storing counterterrorism recordings had only about 4,470 hours waiting for review, and that it had reduced its backlog in that system by about 40 percent since 2003.
But the F.B.I. also acknowledged that some counterterrorism materials were stored in other systems, and that it could not say what their status was. It agreed to overhaul its tracking of such materials as well as act on 23 related recommendations in the report.
Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the F.B.I., called the report “troubling.”
“While the F.B.I. has made progress in this area,” Mr. Leahy said in a statement, “I remain concerned that the bureau’s ability to adequately review this material is still seriously deficient.”
“The ability to quickly and thoroughly translate and review these materials is essential to our national security,” he added.
Clientes, parceiros, colaboradores, amigos e equipe da Paprika festejaram o aniversário da empresa no dia 12 de março, no Bar El Chicano.
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