Improving Language Support

Abstract

After the Dayton Peace Agreement in late 1995, the armed conflict was formally ended. Over the following months, an uneasy peace was achieved, which enabled the first steps to be taken towards rebuilding the country. The language support arrangements, which had been set up in a hurry, slowly evolved to deal with the new demands. But increasingly they struggled to provide the professional language services that the new conditions required. The emerging difficulties can be understood in terms of quality management, a conceptual approach which was being developed energetically in relation to business and public services during the 1990s (Martin 1993). The principles underlying this have since been widely adopted for management purposes in Western countries (Hoyle 2006). This approach defined quality as ‘fitness for purpose’, which meant that the first step was to analyse the needs for which the product or service was required and to develop a set of explicit specifications. It then argued that the achievement of quality outcomes was dependent on a whole system rather than a single variable. These concepts are useful in analysing the development of language support for the military in Bosnia-Herzegovina. They direct inquiry particularly towards understanding the changing needs for language support, the organization in place to provide it, the work processes undertaken and the profile of people carrying them out, especially their qualifications and training.