BYU is major U.S. center for language study

The Fulton gift also will fund expanded online offerings. Beginners, such as freshly called missionaries who have time before entering the Missionary Training Center, will be able to take initial courses while others could use the Web site for refresher courses.

"We have an untapped resource we can now more prominently broadcast because" of this donation, Gessel said.

It's difficult to prove just how good BYU is at training language students beyond the number of courses it offers. There is no way to track how many students are hired based on their language skills, and BYU hasn't had a way to document the actual proficiency of BYU language students.

Ray Clifford decided to fix the latter problem when he arrived at BYU last year from the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif. This summer, BYU will test the language proficiency of its students to compare it to national proficiency standards.

"That will allow us to compare on a factual basis the accomplishments of our student body versus other universities," said Clifford, who is director of BYU's Center for Language Studies.

Clifford said that not only do BYU students take more foreign language classes than students at other colleges, they also take more upper-division or advanced classes.

The reason the DEA, the U.S. State Department and international business and law firms are interested in BYU graduates is because while the world is shrinking, the perception that every country is or will soon be speaking English is erroneous and dangerous.

Clifford said that "when it comes to homeland security, people are discovering that while the rest of the world might be able to speak English, they don't speak English when they're talking about us."

The CIA, FBI and National Security Agency also recruit actively at BYU career fairs. Graduates find work as translators, like Kidman's film character, and as Secret Service agents, like the Sean Penn character who teams up with Kidman in "The Interpreter." Others wind up as analysts, poring over phone calls, documents and other data gathered by the nation's 13 intelligence agencies.

There are overseas posts as well.

"Foreign language skills are really attractive to us because we have about 80 offices in about 50 countries," DEA agent Turner said. "I tell applicants that as special agents with foreign language skills they're going to be using that language to conduct criminal investigations, to solicit information from folks who want to talk to us, or to interview criminal defendants who don't speak English, or working with our counterparts in other countries."

BYU is also the headquarters of the National Middle East Language Resource Center, and the advanced Arabic program is a jewel in the campus language crown.