WarTalk Foreign Languages and the British War Effort in Europe, 1940
Offering a new perspective on the British experience of the Second World War in Europe, this book provides a series of snapshots of the role which languages played in the key processes of British war-making, moving from frameworks of perception and intell
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As international tension increased, it became ever more crucial to find out as much information as possible about the thinking, activities and planning of the country’s potential enemies. Intelligence – both the machinery by which this information would be gathered, and the product of these processes, the information itself – rose up the national agenda. By the outbreak of war, understanding the enemy and thereby pre-empting hostile operations would be a key part of Britain’s wartime effort. A great deal has been written about the role of British Intelligence during the war, in particular the Bletchley Park (the Government Code and Cypher School, GCCS) phenomenon (see, for example, Hinsley 1979–90; Lewin 1978; Welchman 1982; Hinsley and Stripp 1994; Patterson 2008). None of this, however, has engaged with what we might call the ‘foreignness’ of this intelligence, the fact that most of the information accessed in its original form was in a foreign language and hence would have to be translated into English in order to become useful intelligence material. Listening stations dotted around the coast would be intercepting messages which were in the foreign language and had to be accurately taken down and translated. As one observer described the situation early on: [T]he excitement of realizing that they were at long last monitoring radio-telephony messages from German pilots and their ground stations was somewhat marred by the fact that no one at the unit spoke German sufficiently well to understand what was being said. (Clayton 1980: 29). Bletchley Park itself was an enormous translation operation. Naval Intelligence alone processed an average of 18,000 translations per month in the spring of 1944, with some 433 messages translated in just 29
10.1057/9781137305077.0009 - Intelligence in Translation, Hilary Footitt and Simona Tobia
Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to University of Toronto - PalgraveConnect - 2014-12-22
Intelligence in Translation: Finding Out About the Enemy
WarTalk
one eight-hour watch.1 The Army/Air Force intelligence group employed approximately 550 people, receiving material from coded sources in the foreign language, working on a continuous round-the-clock shift system, 8 am to 4 pm, 4 pm to midnight, and midnight to 8 am. Captured documents and reports from prisoner-of-war interrogations swelled the material to be translated. The volume of German documents in Naval Intelligence rose from 1000 in January 1943 to 10,000 in July 1944, and those in Italian from approximately 500 in January 1943 to well over 4000 in the summer of 1944.2 After the liberation of France, ten tons of German documents appeared, needing to be processed and translated. Translation was thus of vital importance to intelligence work – vital to radio intelligence, vital to the analysis of decoded messages, vital to the transmission of information from captured documents and interrogation reports. Understanding the enemy necessarily meant finding out what they were saying and then translating it in
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