Language skills lacking in the U.S. foreign service?

Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy reports that government auditors found language skills among foreign service officers to be far more rare than they would hope. On China, he quotes from the unreleased Government Accountability Office report:

In China, officials told us that the officers in China with insufficient language skills get only half the story on issues of interest, as they receive only the official party line and are unable to communicate with researchers and academics, many of whom do not speak English.

The deficiencies are large in war zones, and the article notes serious shortfalls in Iraq and Afghanistan. The only specific data in this article on Chinese posts groups Chinese with Arabic as important languages:
“Deficiencies in what GAO calls ‘supercritical’ languages, such as Arabic and Chinese, were 39 percent.”

The officers I have met in China seem to be in the 61 percent, but the quote above indicates that someone at least in the embassy thinks the 39 percent blocks the staff from doing the best job possible. From me, one vote for more language study (yes, I need it too), and a dream for leaps forward in machine translation.

The other quote from the report on China, which I leave without comment:

In Shenyang, a Chinese city close to the border with North Korea, the consul general told us that reporting about issues along the border had suffered because of language shortfalls.

Comments

2 responses to “Language skills lacking in the U.S. foreign service?”

  1. language jobs Avatar

    I think Foreign Office should recruit more immigrants to cope with the language issues. So, they need to make the recruitment requirements such as citizenship less tough.

  2. Jobs with Language Avatar

    Interesting topic. It might be worthwhile to not in this case that a recent study done by GFK NOP (market research firm) in UK stated that, one third of the UK businesses agreed that they have lost out on business because the staff was not bilingual. In this age of globalisation, a true international and dynamic organisation must only ignore bilingualism at their own peril.

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