A former cultural adviser who has worked in Kandahar, Afghanistan has revealed that several innocent Afghans may have been sent to jail after being judged as Taliban militants as a result of mistakes made by Canadian military translators. The situation is quite disturbing as military commanders and troops working on the ground are most of the times completely dependent on their translators.
The aforementioned cultural adviser said that he has personally been witness to two such incidents in which innocent Afghans were labeled terrorists just because their translators made errors in understanding the language. However he intervened in both cases and prevented the prisoners from being given over to Afghanistan’s intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security which has been accused of torturing prisoners.
The Canadian Press had initiated an investigation that included interviews with intelligence officers, former translators, National Defense and other Afghan officials. It came across this information in the course of the four-month investigation. Community leaders from Afghanistan who were interviewed by the Canadian Press agreed that it was the erroneous translation of incompetent translators which was creating such serious problems. Although the Canadian military is trying its best to avoid such mistakes they are unable to make much headway in this issue as the problem lies with the department that’s in charge of hiring translators.
Translators come mainly through two sources; they are either members of Afghan-Canadian community who travel to the war zone with senior commanders or local residents who have been screened and hired to travel with the troops. Now a majority of the translators that come from Canada can only speak Dari which is the working language of Afghanistan’s governments. On the other hand Pashto which is the dominant language in southern Afghanistan has comparatively very few translators available.
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