Fluent in Ebonics? The DEA Wants YOU!
Resisting the urge to feed this wire report into an online Ebonics translator, I reproduce it here in the original English:
ATLANTA – Federal agents are seeking to hire Ebonics translators to help interpret wiretapped conversations involving targets of undercover drug investigations.
The Drug Enforcement Agency recently sent memos asking companies that provide translation services to help it find nine translators in the Southeast who are fluent in Ebonics, Special Agent Michael Sanders said Monday.
Ebonics, which is also known as African American Vernacular English, has been described by the psychologist who coined the term as the combination of English vocabulary with African language structure.
Some DEA agents already help translate Ebonics, Sanders said. But he said wasn't sure if the agency has ever hired outside Ebonics experts as contractors.
[...] Linguists said Ebonics can be trickier than it seems, partly because the vocabulary evolves so quickly.
"A lot of times people think you're just dealing with a few slang words, and that you can finesse your way around it," said John Rickford, a Stanford University linguistics professor. "And it's not — it's a big vocabulary. You'll have some significant differences" from English.
Critics worry that the DEA's actions could set a precedent.
"Hiring translators for languages that are of questionable merit to begin with is just going in the wrong direction," said Aloysius Hogan, the government relations director of English First, a national lobbying group that promotes the use of English.
"I'm not aware of Ebonics training schools or tests. I don't know how they'd establish that someone speaks Ebonics," he said. "I support the concept of pursuing drug dealers if they're using code words, but this is definitely going in the wrong direction."
H. Samy Alim, a Stanford linguistics professor who specializes in black language and hip-hop culture, said he thought the hiring effort was a joke when he first heard about it, but that it highlights a serious issue.
"It seems ironic that schools that are serving and educating black children have not recognized the legitimacy of this language. Yet the authorities and the police are recognizing that this is a language that they don't understand," he said. "It really tells us a lot about where we are socially in terms of recognizing African-American speech."
Rickford said that hiring Ebonics experts could come in handy for the DEA, but he said it's hard to determine whether a prospective employee can speak it well enough to translate since there are no standardized tests.
National Ebonics standards now. How more absurd will the drug war get?
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Aug '10
Re: Fluent in Ebonics? The DEA Wants YOU!
few [American blacks] have any ancestral connection to Africa more recent than 150 years ago. Is this something carried in the blood?
Well, that blood IS powerful ... one drop, etc. ...
May '10
Re: Fluent in Ebonics? The DEA Wants YOU!
Midget Faded Rattlesnake
The other theory (which makes more sense to me) is that African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) has much less to do with Africa than it does with the redneck dialect spoken by Southern whites.
Having grown up around Southern blacks, I agree with that theory. The rhythms are the same and there are many shared expressions. The main difference is a preference for either soft-spoken Victorian manners or bold expressiveness. That difference often leads to one being thought rude while the other seems stuck up.
I generally refuse to use the term "African American" because there is no clearly African aspect to the culture. There is some cultural inheritance from various tribes, but it's distant and diluted. Besides, "African" is as nondescript as "European". Irish and Italians have Christian and classical influences in common, but little else. West Africans and North Africans have even less in common. That doesn't mean I begrudge blacks for taking interest in their ancestry, though.
I'm a little bothered by the continued use of the physical anthropology term "caucasian" while its counterparts, like "negroid" and "mongoloid", are taboo.
Aug '10
Re: Fluent in Ebonics? The DEA Wants YOU!
I've worked DEA cases before, and we've been up on wires. It's hard as hell to decipher what's being said even when they're speaking clearly. Most of these guys speak in a kind of "drug code" that's never standardized, and has to be unwound intuitively.
We were up on a wire once where we had to bring in a Jamacian translator. Most of the wires involve Spanish speakers, and even when they're speaking English, it's more like a version of Spanglish.
I agree with you guys that, as a rule, approaching "Ebonics speakers" as anything less than scam artists is foolish, especially with government money, but when you have a job to do, when you have to get the info off the wires and get actionable intelligence from it, well, you do what you have to do. If that means hiring "Ebonics speakers" (more likely, people who can intuitively understand street lingo), so be it.
May '10
Re: Fluent in Ebonics? The DEA Wants YOU!
The DEA has discovered that low-class blacks have a dialect?
Has the CIA started investigating people who want to learn how to take off in an airplane? Or at least started recruiting Russian translators so we can beat those Reds?
Aug '10
Re: Fluent in Ebonics? The DEA Wants YOU!
Midget Faded Rattlesnake
There are two competing linguistic theories here.
The other theory (which makes more sense to me) is that African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) has much less to do with Africa than it does with the redneck dialect spoken by Southern whites.
Southern whites came mostly from the UK's Border Country, where the speech was already different from the part of England Northerners came from, and the pre-emigration speech differences were strikingly similar to the differences between Standard American English and the commonalities (which are many) between "redneck" and AAVE today.
That sounds far more plausible to me. Ebonics sounds a lot like redneck vernacular to me.