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Titan Corp’s Translation Work Has Global Scope

Titan Corp’s Translation Work Has Global Scope

BY BRAD GRAVES

Army Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba’s report about conditions at the U.S. military prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq offers a glimpse of civilian contractors at work there, and it mentions employees working under a Titan Corp. contract.

But its focus on Abu Ghraib doesn’t begin to show the extent of the global translation work done by Titan, a San Diego company.

Titan employs 4,200 translators, who are fanned out all over the world. The $1.8 billion publicly traded company said the language work brought in 7 percent of its 2003 revenue.

While Taguba’s report places Titan translators at the prison, the government has not contacted Titan with any allegations of wrongdoing, a company spokesman said.

Titan’s chairman and chief executive, Gene Ray, issued a statement last week expressing “distress and dismay over the horrific events” at Abu Ghraib.

” Titan is committed to full cooperation with government investigations into these matters,” Ray said. “Should evidence arise of unethical or illegal behavior, we will take appropriate action.”

Deborah Parker, a spokeswoman for the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command at Fort Belvoir, Va., said most of the 4,200 translators and interpreters employed under the Titan contract work in the Army’s Central Command area. The region extends from the Horn of Africa to central Asia. Parker said translators are in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, and Qatar.

She said the translators help the Army with intelligence operations and “contingency” operations, such as peacekeeping.

Titan got into the translation business with its $140 million acquisition of Virginia-based BTG, Inc. in late 2001. Like Titan, BTG works primarily in information technology. When the sale closed, BTG was about halfway through a five-year contract to provide the Army with translators.

Now, Titan itself is an acquisition candidate. Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed Martin Corp. is working to acquire Titan, but the deal has been delayed twice because of government investigations into an unrelated matter.

Work on the current translation contract began in April 1999. Today, Parker said, roughly $540 million of work has accumulated on the contract, which has a ceiling value of $657 million. Parker said the Army extended the contract for six months. It will expire on Sept. 30 of this year.

The Army is hearing proposals for a new contract, which the command expects to award in mid-June.

Titan wants the work again.

“Certainly we’ll go after the contract,” said Titan spokesman Wil Williams.

Sixty-one other companies, including San Diego-based Science Applications International Corp., have at least expressed interest in the contract, according to the Army command’s Web site.

The new contract calls for translators who speak a variety of languages, including modern standard Arabic as well as the Egyptian, Iraqi, Mahgrebi, Saudi, and Yemeni variants of Arabic. Other languages are Aramaic, Bengali, Mandarin Chinese, French, Hebrew, Kurdish, Pashtu, Dari, Somali, and Turkish.

The new contract calls for interpreters to provide not just translations, but the cultural and ethnic significance of statements and situations. It calls for people willing to work and live in a harsh environment, and who can “deal unobtrusively with (the) local populace.”

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