Please paraphrase the sentence: "The boom in translation jobs comes because of-and despite

6 billion contract to provide translators and interpreters in Iraq. A new venture called Global Linguistic Solutions (GLS), headed by retired Army Major General James (Spider) Marks and primarily formed to bid on the contract, landed the job. The surprise caused L-3 shares to fall nearly 6%; the company lowered its sales forecast this year by $ 500 million.

Winning the contract may be the easy part for GLS. Luring interpreters to Iraq is another story. Job listings posted on L-3's website read like something out of a Tom Clancy thriller. Wanted. "Arabic Linguist… Ability to deal unobtrusively with the local populace… Must be able to live in a harsh environment." The pay isn't mentioned, but L-3 recently offered interpreters more than $175,000 annually to work in Iraq. Linguists usually don't carry weapons and are often called on to participate in raids and other combat-related tasks. Casualty reports show that L-3's Titan Corp, the major contractor supplying interpreters to the U.S. military, had 216 employees killed in Iraq—nearly 100 more fatalities than the entire British army stationed there.

Danger is just one way that the linguistics industry—interpreters who relay live chat and translators who process documents—has changed dramatically. More benignly, the Web and the global economy have led to 7.5% annual growth in the market, now pegged as a $ 9.4 billion business, according to research group Common Sense Advisory. While much of that is due to the military, there has been renewed growth elsewhere. "Firms from Starbucks to McDonald's now have to communicate and market to customers in dozens of different languages," says Common Sense Advisory president Don DePalma.

The boom in translation jobs comes because of—and despite—technology. DePalma says there has been real acceleration in demand tied to software, since Microsoft's new Vista operating system, updated versions of Mac and various other electronic devices have to conform. to European standards. That requires local language to be used in everything from instruction manuals to safety standards. Add the growing use of bilingual signage aimed at Hispanics, multilingual U.S. court requirements and hospital needs, and over the next eight years, full-time linguistics employment is expected to jump more than 25%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Computers are certainly doing some of the work. Companies like eBay, GM and Motorola have all used software from Massachusetts firm Idiom Technologies to help power their efforts in localization, as language targeting is sometimes called. Still, it often takes a real brain to differentiate terms in context: the word trunk can refer to a suitcase, a car hatch or an elephant's snout, for example.

The biggest player in translation services last year was publicly held Lionbridge, employing 4,000 full-time staff members and 10,000 freelancers in 25 countries, with a current market cap of $350 million. Lionbridge, based in Massachusetts, translates technology for mobile-phone companies and clients such as McDonald's, Google and Yahoo! "Computer code is code," says Lionbridge chief marketing officer Kevin Bolen. "But certain things such as metrics, time stamps and characters have to be re-engineered and hard-encoded into the software to display Japanese kanji, for instance."

Lionhridge and its competitors recruit at universities and industry websites such as linguistlist, org with specialists of all stripes in demand, from automotive experts to those with a knack for medical jargon. "India has about a dozen dialects needed to capture a substantial customer base," says Bolen, "so for Nokia we? re translating applications and phones and instructions in nine different ways."

Thanks to the Web, new companies become global from the get-go rather than at a later phase, Bolen

mid which fate has thrown them not only with resignation but even with good will. They are like streetcars running contentedly on their rails and they despise the sprightly flivver that dashes in and out of the traffic and speeds so jauntily across the open country. I respect them; they are good citizens, good husbands, good fathers, and of course somebody has to pay the taxes; but I do not find them exciting. I am fascinated by the men, few enough in all conscience, who take life in their own hands and seem to mould it to their own liking. It may be that we have no such thing as free will, but at all events we have the illusion of it. At a crossroad it does seem to us that we might go either to the right or the left and, once the choice is made, it is difficult to see that the whole course of the world's history obliged us to take the turning we did.

n, we do not know the names of the earliest composers. Early music was based on single tunes, or melodies.

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The most useful bit of the media is disappearing. A cause for concern, but not for panic.

"A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself," mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart.

Of all the "old" media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.

Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost unseemly, largely because the internet is a seductive medium that supposedly matches buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that their money is well spent. Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the Beaverbrook of our age, once described them as the industry's rivers of gold— but, as he said last year, "Sometimes rivers dry up." In Switzerland and the Netherlands newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the internet.

Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.

Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle. and subjects that may seem more relevant to people's daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on-and offline. And they are investing in free daily papers, which do not use up any of their meager editorial resources on uncovering political corruption or corporate fraud. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it does, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.

In future, argues Carnegie, some high-quality journalism will also be backed by non-profit organizations. Already, a few respected news organizations sustain themselves that way—including the Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor and National Public Radio. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charitie

onsumer-based society that was concerned only with acquisition. Blue-jeans-wearing rebels of popular movies were an expression of contempt towards the empty and obedient silence of the Cold- War American; the positive images of American consumer society were under siege. What had been a piece of traditional American culture—blue jeans—became a rejection of traditional culture. These images found an eager audience among those for whom gray suits and formal dresses had been elevated as ideals of the age. In blue jeans, men and boys found relief from the underlying harness required to fit into more formal water. Even some among the middle class slipped into jeans for a sleepy afternoon on the porch.

ess stable than America's"? (Para.3)