Preparing to Liberate

Abstract

In recent times, the importance of troops undertaking some form of cultural preparation before they deploy to foreign countries has become of considerable relevance, as shown in the Ministry of Defence’s 2009 Joint Doctrine paper ‘The Significance of Culture to the Military’, which devoted 508 closely-argued paragraphs to the ways in which soldiers’ cultural understanding pre-deployment could be strengthened by using cultural analysis templates and frameworks of cultural capability (Ministry of Defence, Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre 2009). The relationship between cultural preparation on the one hand and linguistic preparation on the other, has, however, always seemed more problematic. An epistemological uncertainty about how language and culture relate in pre-deployment preparations tends to position languages as an addendum to cultural training (only three paragraphs in the 2009 MOD document), a high-level competence area which is necessarily restricted to a minority of servicemen and women: ‘Whilst all personnel can benefit from enhanced cultural capability, language capability will remain a specialisation’ (Ministry of Defence, Development Concepts and Doctrine Centre 2009: 1/5–1/6).

It is never very easy to make yourself understood at first in a foreign language, and it may be even less easy to understand a Frenchman’s reply[.]¹