Ebonics and Drug Investigations Essay

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DEA wants to hire Ebonics translators" by Carol Cratty and Phil Gast, 2010

Ebonics, or African-American English, is the term coined in the mid-1990s to describe a manner of speech used by some African-Americans that some linguists maintain is a legitimate dialect that deserves further study. More pragmatically, the point is made in the title article that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) wants translators who are fluent in Ebonics to facilitate criminal investigations involving Ebonics speakers who may or may not be African-American suspects, but which may also include Hispanics and white Americans. To determine the facts, this paper provides a summary of the title article to include a summary its goal, background information relevant to the article, the authors' findings and conclusions, and the evidence used by the authors to support their claims. In addition, this review also evaluates the respective strengths and weaknesses of the news article and the extent to which the study is based on facts and linguistic research in the study of African-American English (AAE). Finally, a summary of the research and important findings concerning these issues are presented in the conclusion.

Summary

During World War II, the United States used so-called Native American "code-talkers" from the Navajo and Comanche tribes, among others, in the Pacific theater to communicate radio messages that were virtually indecipherable to Japanese code breakers (Broderick, 2011). These code-talkers would coin terms in their native languages to replace Standard American English (SAE) terms in ways that made this American intelligence-gathering strategy enormously effective (Broderick, 2011). It is reasonable to suggest that the Japanese would have gladly recruited several translators of these languages had they been available, and the DEA is in a similar predicament when it comes to criminal investigations involving suspects who speak Ebonics.

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The goal of the title article by Cratty and Gast (2010) was to provide a report concerning the DEA active recruitment of nine Ebonics translators as part of a larger translator recruitment initiative in order to help them with criminal investigations that involve Ebonics speakers who may attempt to use this relatively esoteric dialect to conceal their criminal activities. The authors provide a concise background concerning the origins of the term and how Ebonics has been the subject of controversy over the years since its introduction in 1996 and objectively report the pros and cons of the initiative. The authors present excerpts of a series of interviews with a DEA special agent and several linguistic authorities to explain the rationale in support of the recruitment effort and how the translators would be used in criminal investigations if the need arose. In sum, this article provides a concise but thorough report concerning the DEA recruiting efforts for nine Ebonics translators including the agency's reasoning and how experts in the field view the effort.

Evaluation

Strengths. To their credit, one of the major strengths of this article is the balanced approach the authors use to present both sides of the controversy. For instance, Cratty and Gast also the responses of professional linguists concerning the DEA's recruitment efforts. On the one hand, the authors interviewed Walt Wolfram, whom they describe as a "distinguished professor of English linguistics at North Carolina State University." Following a discussion concerning the origins of the term and an explanation by Dr. Wolfram concerning the misperceptions about Ebonics that have politicized the debate over its usefulness in academic and other settings, including criminal investigations, Cratty and….....

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