Thaindian News

Aug 24 (THAINDIAN NEWS) According to federal records, the Department of Justice in the United States, along with the DEA or Drug Enforcement Administration is seeking nine people who can translate conversation which are recorded during investigations, and they are asking for Ebonics Translators.

The Atlanta, Georgia field division of the DEA is looking to hire a maximum of nine people who specilize in Ebonics who will be given “DEA Sensitive” security clearance so that they can ehlp the agency by translating “telephonic monitoring of court ordered non-consensual intercepts, consensual listening devices, and other media”

As many as 2100 linguists are needed by the DEA, as was proposed in mid May, as various field offices are searching for translators of 114 different languages. Ebonics is listed as one of those “languages” and experts who can speak Ebonics are needed in Georgia.

The term “Ebonics” has often been the topic of controversy among Americans in the age of “political correctness”. It is considered to be a nonstandard form of English which is mostly spoken by African Americans, or as Stanford University professor of linguistics John R Rickford called it, “Black English”. Rickford noted that “Ebonics pronunciation includes features like the omission of the final consonant in words like ‘past’ (pas’ ) and ‘hand’ (han’), the pronunciation of the th in ‘bath’ as t (bat) or f (baf), and the pronunciation of the vowel in words like ‘my’ and ‘ride’ as a long ah (mah, rahd).”