Intelligence in Translation: Finding Out About the Enemy

Abstract

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).