military, federal agencies and nongovernmental organizations. Those airmen acted as advocates for Afghan evacuees as they tried to piece together a path forward with the U.S.
That grew from eight people to about 130 airmen who offered language support during the massive U.S.-led humanitarian evacuation and the domestic resettlement effort, McAndrews said. “Trying to spin them up in order to safely get through the Afghanistan withdrawal was challenging,” Armstrong said. That included two Chinese experts who had previously studied Pashto. “We brought some folks back who had already gone to other languages, but hadn’t quite become unqualified yet.” Between, we split them up the best we could,” Armstrong told Air Force Times in April. military dealt with that time crunch firsthand while withdrawing from its two-decade war in Afghanistan last summer.Īs of May 2021, the Air Force had just eight linguists who spoke Pashto, one of Afghanistan’s two official languages that is spoken by about half of the population, said Armstrong, who helped manage the withdrawal as an operations director at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, before moving to Offutt. In many cases, getting someone up to speed to decipher military chatter in a foreign language - heard over a crackly headset, during a crisis, with little backup - requires squeezing what is typically an 18-month process into a matter of weeks. “After shadowing her for a day, I stepped in and did the interpreting for all of the Ukrainian students so she could focus on learning the material.” “One of the Ukrainian students was originally working as an interpreter for the other students,” Garcia said. The students were in Mississippi when Russian forces invaded their home country on Feb. Garcia spent three weeks with the Ukrainians as they progressed through courses on patrol craft, diesel systems maintenance and international tactical communications. “My development through LEAP training and eMentor courses helped me be able to adapt and learn at the speed I needed to.” “It was critical to hit the ground running, so there was not a lot of time to get spun up on the technical terminology related to the subjects,” he said in a May 12 release. The initiative offers online classes for active duty airmen and Space Force guardians to gain a working knowledge of a foreign language. Garcia, who speaks Ukrainian and Russian, was part of the Air Force’s Language-Enabled Airman Program. Navy program in Mississippi that trains foreign special operations troops in tactics and strategy, earlier this year. Jordan Garcia stepped in as an interpreter for Ukrainian students at the Naval Small Craft Instruction and Technical Training School, a U.S.
0 kommentar(er)
