PDA

View Full Version : Cards help deployed troops bridge language gap



thedrifter
02-13-06, 06:40 AM
Cards help deployed troops bridge language gap
February 13,2006
ANNE CLARK
DAILY NEWS STAFF

They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, and in this story a picture likely saved a little girl’s life. American soldiers were manning a checkpoint in Iraq when a local man ran up to them, screaming the word “hospital” repeatedly. The soldiers pulled out a laminated picture card. The man pointed to a picture of a gas tank, then to one of a little girl. He made a drinking motion with his hand.

“The man was able to relate that his daughter drank gasoline,” said Dave Barber, chief operating officer for Kwikpoint. The American soldiers rushed to the father’s car and found the child, about 6 years old, unconscious and gray. They got her to a hospital, where she recovered. Since then, the U.S. Army has made Kwikpoint Visual Language Translators standard issue for soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Barber said that 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines, based out of Camp Lejeune, deployed with Kwikpoint cards, though no one from that unit could be reached for confirmation.

The colorful cards come in 35 different titles for travelers as well as professionals in the tourism industry, medicine, law enforcement, and the military. Folded, they’re about as big as an index card. Inside, the Marine Special Ops VLT features survival phrases like “What is the terrain like?” or commands like “Stop” and “Speak slowly” spelled out phonetically and in Arabic letters. A body chart and identification chart allows local Iraqis to describe, feature by feature, the appearance of any bad guys in the area. Pictured rank insignias for Iraqi police and military help American troops know to whom they’re speaking. There are cultural references, too, reminding American forces to shake with their right hand and try all food when they’re a guest in an Iraqi home.

The latest title in the Kwikpoint library is a card that will help local Iraqis report any bomb-making activity to American forces. The idea to communicate with pictures came to Kwikpoint President Alan Stillman years ago on a bicycle trip through Europe. Tired of carrying around phrase books for each country, he began cutting out pictures from magazines to communicate with the locals he met.

Using this “visual language” can be effective, said Anthropology Professor Robert Daniels from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“Using a live translator introduces a whole social environment that could influence the conversation,” said Daniels. Using pictures, Daniels said, could eliminate what he called “cultural static,” such as dialect.

Kwikpoint relies on a team of graphic designers and product developers to come up with the images, at least 600 so far. Military experts, linguists, diplomats, as well as native-born Iraqis and Aghanis ensure the pictures are universally understood, and then the cards are tested in the field.

“It’s an amazing tool,” said Barber, who is also a former officer in the U.S. Navy. “It’s simple to use, and costs the same as an MRE.”