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January 5, 2004
Many tongues | Conflict overseas puts the services of a Rumford business in high demand
By Sean Donahue
For at least one group of specialists, deployment to Afghanistan or Iraq begins with a stop in Rumford.
Worldwide Language Resources, a small business based in the western Maine town better known for its MeadWestvaco paper mill, has steadily been supplying the U.S. military and intelligence agencies with native speakers vital to conducting overseas operations. Working mostly on government contracts, WWLR either recruits bilingual citizens to act as translators and interpreters, or provides English speakers with intensive training in foreign languages not commonly taught in academic settings, including Arabic, Dari, Farsi and Pashto. Business has been so good recently that WWLR plans to add up to 10 additional people to its staff, and is about to move from its current offices on River Street in Rumford to a nearby building that offers twice the space.
Company founder Larry Costa is a former Green Beret who, during his years in the Special Forces, realized the military's own language training capabilities couldn't meet the demand of troops deployed in increasingly far-flung territories. He created WWLR in Reading, Mass. in 1995, and since then the company has been quietly involved with nearly every significant overseas conflict. (Costa moved the operation to his farmhouse in Maine in 1997, where it quickly outgrew its home-office confines before moving to downtown Rumford.) WWLR had translators in the Balkans during the Kosovo conflict and, for a time, at the Guantanamo Bay camp holding prisoners from Afghanistan. Now, the company's contractors are increasingly in demand in Iraq, where they help troops communicate with locals and act as recruiters for private-sector reconstruction projects.
Costa was in Afghanistan and unreachable when the company announced its relocation plans, so Mainebiz spoke with Scott Owings, WWLR's director of business development, about the company's growth, its recruiting techniques and what it's like to run an international operation from western Maine.
What's driving Worldwide Language Resources' recently announced expansion?
With actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the need for linguists on the ground and embedded with troops has grown a great deal. And now that reconstruction is underway, the need for linguists has not gone away, and maybe even increased. Linguists can help in everything from training the new Iraqi army to recruiting local welders, pipefitters and mechanics ˆ any type of reconstruction project, humanitarian aid effort or military action.
We're a small business that's growing into a large business. We had just under 20 people here six months ago. Now, we're closer to 30 in this office, not counting all our people overseas. I'd say we have between 400 and 500 contractors overseas, but that's a rough guess.
Besides the increased demand, in what ways has the business changed since Sept. 11?
At first language instruction was pretty much all the company did, besides a little document translation and some interpretation. We might send an instructor to a military base so soldiers could sit in a classroom and get language instruction. We also offered immersion training ˆ sending students to a country to be immersed in the language and culture they were learning. A student of Arabic might go Tunisia, where they would have to learn the language or else not be able to function. It's a good way to learn quickly, and also informally. You learn slang and dialect that you might not learn in the classroom.
After 9/11, when the war on terrorism began to heat up and it became clear that we were in this for long haul, we began providing more interpreters and translators to be on the ground with the troops. There isn't time to teach all the troops the Iraqi dialect of Arabic, so instead we provide interpreters to move with troops to act as translators when they are speaking to locals.
So 9/11 changed our focus dramatically. We used to be 70%-80% focused on language training for troops. Now we're 70%-80% focused on providing translators to those troops.
How do you go about finding all those translators?
We have a full-fledged recruiting staff here, predominantly staffed by linguists, that gets people on board who either have already been interpreters or translators in the military, or else have the ability to become them because they are bilingual. We have people who speak Pashto, a language spoken predominantly in Afghanistan, and Arabic in the Iraqi dialect. We used to have someone on our recruiting staff who spoke Serbo-Croatian when it was a hot language. It's not right now, so we don't have a speaker on staff.
Those recruiters penetrate communities around the country where people are bilingual and get the word out that we are looking for translators. Sometimes they travel to these communities, sometimes we place ads in newspapers, but a lot of it is done over the phone or the Internet. The Internet has been a big help to us. We like to hire former military linguists as project managers, so we keep close watch on Internet resume sites, looking for people getting out of military who have language skills.
Security must be a big concern. How do you screen potential recruits?
We process all our recruits for security clearance. We're an officially designated top secret facility, so each person is inspected and carefully screened by the Department of Defense's Defense Security Service. Basically, you have to fill out the longest government form you've ever seen in your life. It asks you to list every place you've ever been, where you went to school, everyone who knows you, that kind of thing.
We also do our own in-house screening before we bring anyone on board, but nowhere near on the same level as the DSS. Our recruiting staff is also good at weeding out a person who is not what the military is looking for. To be a linguist working with the military, you have to be in a certain type of physical shape, among other factors.
Once potential recruits are clear, how do you connect them with overseas projects?
Once the DSS has checked into that information and given a clearance, we bring the recruits here to Maine to do our own set of processing. They are actually subcontractors, so we get their contracts signed, get their flight itineraries taken care of and get them ready to go overseas. It's about a three-day process.
Then we send them to a couple of select military posts around country, where they go through a process that includes medical screening and outfitting in military equipment like camouflage clothes, helmets and flak jackets. That takes about another week, and then they're ready to deploy overseas, where our project managers assign each translator to a specific post.
Which languages are in highest demand now?
There are two hot languages right now. Number one is Pashto. If you spoke Pashto and English, you'd get a good job pretty quick. We have close to 100 people on the ground in Afghanistan right now, and a few of those are Urdu speakers, a few Arabic and a few Russian, but most of them are Pashto speakers.
The Iraqi dialect of Arabic is also big. We probably have about 60-80 U.S. citizens in Iraq, and about 200 Iraqi nationals working for us. Our company is involved with training the new Iraqi army ˆ we are the language contingent of that contract. So we're running recruiting stations and providing interpreters and translators to help that process.
Who else besides the military are your typical customer?
We have done some work with intelligence agencies and the Department of Justice, as well as state law enforcement groups. We also do a bit of work with state government agencies and hospitals that need interpreters to deal with non-English speaking clients and patients.
In the private sector, we've worked with Wal-Mart when they were expanding overseas and needed folks who spoke the local language to train their new personnel. We probably don't do as much of that work, with companies establishing operations overseas, as we should be doing.
You must bring a pretty diverse mix of people through western Maine. How has the local community reacted?
Our in-house recruiting staff is very diverse. We have a gentleman here from Afghanistan, a Yemeni gentleman, and one gentleman from Kurdistan. But it's amazing the looks you get. People's reaction of surprise is quite humorous when we bring 20 Afghani men into the office before sending them overseas. It's not something the local community is used to, but people have been very supportive. That's why Mr. Costa has kept the company here. Our business really could be anywhere, but Mr. Costa keeps it here because he likes Maine, he likes Oxford County and he likes Rumford.
It's also helpful to be here because it is quiet and isolated. We don't have to put up with the hustle and bustle of Boston, the higher prices and everything else that comes with a major metropolitan area. I'd rather hire a driver to pick up our recruits at the airport two hours away than put up with a whole host of difficulties that would come from being in a bigger city. But it means that I'm on a plane to Washington D.C. on a regular basis, probably on average two times a month, to attend conferences or meet with potential clients.
How else is running this company different from running a typical business?
It's a very specialized business. That's the best word I can come up with to describe it. I think to do well in it requires that you have the military background that Mr. Costa has, because you already understand the way the military works. Even then, there's years of trial and error and persistence required, because working with the government is never easy.
Day to day, minor cultural differences can always trip you up ˆ just the time change alone makes you realize how difficult it is to run your business. Sending a fax to someone in the states may take a total of five minutes, but to get that information to our contractors in Iraq can take days because the connections are so bad and people keep blowing things up.
And most businesses don't have to think about their employees being shot at. We have to worry about that. Our contractors' safety is our utmost concern because our service is not just providing an inanimate object. We're providing living, breathing people with families and aspirations. During their weeklong processing with military, when they are outfitted with helmets and flak jackets, they receive basic training to prepare them for combat situations. But basically they learn that if they stay where they're supposed to be, don't open their mouths when they shouldn't and mind their Ps and Qs, they'll generally be safe.
Have any of your contractors been killed?
We've had some injuries, mostly minor injuries and some moderate, but thank God no deaths.
Worldwide Language Resources, a small business based in the western Maine town better known for its MeadWestvaco paper mill, has steadily been supplying the U.S. military and intelligence agencies with native speakers vital to conducting overseas operations. Working mostly on government contracts, WWLR either recruits bilingual citizens to act as translators and interpreters, or provides English speakers with intensive training in foreign languages not commonly taught in academic settings, including Arabic, Dari, Farsi and Pashto. Business has been so good recently that WWLR plans to add up to 10 additional people to its staff, and is about to move from its current offices on River Street in Rumford to a nearby building that offers twice the space.
Company founder Larry Costa is a former Green Beret who, during his years in the Special Forces, realized the military's own language training capabilities couldn't meet the demand of troops deployed in increasingly far-flung territories. He created WWLR in Reading, Mass. in 1995, and since then the company has been quietly involved with nearly every significant overseas conflict. (Costa moved the operation to his farmhouse in Maine in 1997, where it quickly outgrew its home-office confines before moving to downtown Rumford.) WWLR had translators in the Balkans during the Kosovo conflict and, for a time, at the Guantanamo Bay camp holding prisoners from Afghanistan. Now, the company's contractors are increasingly in demand in Iraq, where they help troops communicate with locals and act as recruiters for private-sector reconstruction projects.
Costa was in Afghanistan and unreachable when the company announced its relocation plans, so Mainebiz spoke with Scott Owings, WWLR's director of business development, about the company's growth, its recruiting techniques and what it's like to run an international operation from western Maine.
What's driving Worldwide Language Resources' recently announced expansion?
With actions in Afghanistan and Iraq, the need for linguists on the ground and embedded with troops has grown a great deal. And now that reconstruction is underway, the need for linguists has not gone away, and maybe even increased. Linguists can help in everything from training the new Iraqi army to recruiting local welders, pipefitters and mechanics ˆ any type of reconstruction project, humanitarian aid effort or military action.
We're a small business that's growing into a large business. We had just under 20 people here six months ago. Now, we're closer to 30 in this office, not counting all our people overseas. I'd say we have between 400 and 500 contractors overseas, but that's a rough guess.
Besides the increased demand, in what ways has the business changed since Sept. 11?
At first language instruction was pretty much all the company did, besides a little document translation and some interpretation. We might send an instructor to a military base so soldiers could sit in a classroom and get language instruction. We also offered immersion training ˆ sending students to a country to be immersed in the language and culture they were learning. A student of Arabic might go Tunisia, where they would have to learn the language or else not be able to function. It's a good way to learn quickly, and also informally. You learn slang and dialect that you might not learn in the classroom.
After 9/11, when the war on terrorism began to heat up and it became clear that we were in this for long haul, we began providing more interpreters and translators to be on the ground with the troops. There isn't time to teach all the troops the Iraqi dialect of Arabic, so instead we provide interpreters to move with troops to act as translators when they are speaking to locals.
So 9/11 changed our focus dramatically. We used to be 70%-80% focused on language training for troops. Now we're 70%-80% focused on providing translators to those troops.
How do you go about finding all those translators?
We have a full-fledged recruiting staff here, predominantly staffed by linguists, that gets people on board who either have already been interpreters or translators in the military, or else have the ability to become them because they are bilingual. We have people who speak Pashto, a language spoken predominantly in Afghanistan, and Arabic in the Iraqi dialect. We used to have someone on our recruiting staff who spoke Serbo-Croatian when it was a hot language. It's not right now, so we don't have a speaker on staff.
Those recruiters penetrate communities around the country where people are bilingual and get the word out that we are looking for translators. Sometimes they travel to these communities, sometimes we place ads in newspapers, but a lot of it is done over the phone or the Internet. The Internet has been a big help to us. We like to hire former military linguists as project managers, so we keep close watch on Internet resume sites, looking for people getting out of military who have language skills.
Security must be a big concern. How do you screen potential recruits?
We process all our recruits for security clearance. We're an officially designated top secret facility, so each person is inspected and carefully screened by the Department of Defense's Defense Security Service. Basically, you have to fill out the longest government form you've ever seen in your life. It asks you to list every place you've ever been, where you went to school, everyone who knows you, that kind of thing.
We also do our own in-house screening before we bring anyone on board, but nowhere near on the same level as the DSS. Our recruiting staff is also good at weeding out a person who is not what the military is looking for. To be a linguist working with the military, you have to be in a certain type of physical shape, among other factors.
Once potential recruits are clear, how do you connect them with overseas projects?
Once the DSS has checked into that information and given a clearance, we bring the recruits here to Maine to do our own set of processing. They are actually subcontractors, so we get their contracts signed, get their flight itineraries taken care of and get them ready to go overseas. It's about a three-day process.
Then we send them to a couple of select military posts around country, where they go through a process that includes medical screening and outfitting in military equipment like camouflage clothes, helmets and flak jackets. That takes about another week, and then they're ready to deploy overseas, where our project managers assign each translator to a specific post.
Which languages are in highest demand now?
There are two hot languages right now. Number one is Pashto. If you spoke Pashto and English, you'd get a good job pretty quick. We have close to 100 people on the ground in Afghanistan right now, and a few of those are Urdu speakers, a few Arabic and a few Russian, but most of them are Pashto speakers.
The Iraqi dialect of Arabic is also big. We probably have about 60-80 U.S. citizens in Iraq, and about 200 Iraqi nationals working for us. Our company is involved with training the new Iraqi army ˆ we are the language contingent of that contract. So we're running recruiting stations and providing interpreters and translators to help that process.
Who else besides the military are your typical customer?
We have done some work with intelligence agencies and the Department of Justice, as well as state law enforcement groups. We also do a bit of work with state government agencies and hospitals that need interpreters to deal with non-English speaking clients and patients.
In the private sector, we've worked with Wal-Mart when they were expanding overseas and needed folks who spoke the local language to train their new personnel. We probably don't do as much of that work, with companies establishing operations overseas, as we should be doing.
You must bring a pretty diverse mix of people through western Maine. How has the local community reacted?
Our in-house recruiting staff is very diverse. We have a gentleman here from Afghanistan, a Yemeni gentleman, and one gentleman from Kurdistan. But it's amazing the looks you get. People's reaction of surprise is quite humorous when we bring 20 Afghani men into the office before sending them overseas. It's not something the local community is used to, but people have been very supportive. That's why Mr. Costa has kept the company here. Our business really could be anywhere, but Mr. Costa keeps it here because he likes Maine, he likes Oxford County and he likes Rumford.
It's also helpful to be here because it is quiet and isolated. We don't have to put up with the hustle and bustle of Boston, the higher prices and everything else that comes with a major metropolitan area. I'd rather hire a driver to pick up our recruits at the airport two hours away than put up with a whole host of difficulties that would come from being in a bigger city. But it means that I'm on a plane to Washington D.C. on a regular basis, probably on average two times a month, to attend conferences or meet with potential clients.
How else is running this company different from running a typical business?
It's a very specialized business. That's the best word I can come up with to describe it. I think to do well in it requires that you have the military background that Mr. Costa has, because you already understand the way the military works. Even then, there's years of trial and error and persistence required, because working with the government is never easy.
Day to day, minor cultural differences can always trip you up ˆ just the time change alone makes you realize how difficult it is to run your business. Sending a fax to someone in the states may take a total of five minutes, but to get that information to our contractors in Iraq can take days because the connections are so bad and people keep blowing things up.
And most businesses don't have to think about their employees being shot at. We have to worry about that. Our contractors' safety is our utmost concern because our service is not just providing an inanimate object. We're providing living, breathing people with families and aspirations. During their weeklong processing with military, when they are outfitted with helmets and flak jackets, they receive basic training to prepare them for combat situations. But basically they learn that if they stay where they're supposed to be, don't open their mouths when they shouldn't and mind their Ps and Qs, they'll generally be safe.
Have any of your contractors been killed?
We've had some injuries, mostly minor injuries and some moderate, but thank God no deaths.
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