The bookish stereotype of linguists just got a little sexier. In today’s article in The Los Angeles Times, Sebastian Rotella draws attention to the power of the word by profiling the work being done by linguists employed by anti-terrorism agencies.

The focus on world relations with the Middle East has made bilingual, bicultural Arabic-speaking investigators and translators the hottest thing since sliced bread. The risks Rotella lists give linguists the romantic glow that the Indiana Jones trilogy lent to the study of archaeology.

Ideally, translators and interpreters are teamed with detectives; the precision and subtleties involved in the nuances of culture and language mean that this job requires a high level of human sensitivity which computers can’t match. The French interpreter Rotella interviewed for his article, whom he refers to as “Wadad,” believes the best linguists are bilingual and bicultural from childhood:

“Otherwise, you might understand the words but not the meaning … You have to understand the dialect, [the] mentality, [the] history. If you don’t know the two civilizations, it’s very difficult. A North African might constantly mention Allah in his conversations. But that’s common. It doesn’t mean he’s a religious extremist … There are Arabists in France who are brilliant intellectuals and know a lot, but I think there are things that escape them. I think if Arabic is not your mother tongue, if you don’t read the Koran from the perspective of a devout Muslim and try to see it with the mind-set of the time when it was written, you miss things. The academics try to make everything fit into their theories.”