Linguist
DYTALEX, LLC
Total years of experience :23 years, 4 Months
• Translation, interpreting, desktop publishing, audio-video production, proofreading, and editing material for a vast number of commercial translation companies in the United States, the Middle East, and Europe. Materials covered include general documents (birth certificates, passports, etc.), patent applications, instruction manuals, contracts, insurance policies, maps, telephone recordings, minutes of meetings, dictionaries and glossaries, medical records, audio transcriptions and translations, commercial captions, subtitles, and many other items, in the following language combinations:
• Senior linguist & analyst translating tens of thousands of documents from Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Urdu, and Pashto into English, holding final QC authority over all documents translated from Middle Eastern and South Asian languages into English, while working as a consultant with SM Consulting, Inc. from October 2004 to December 2005. Also assisted other analysts speaking only English in data mining, information collection, assembly, and review, and drafting written analyses and reports.
• Provided exclusive translation support for a large and highly technical mixed Tajik-Arabic document involving chemistry and physics, while working as a consultant with SM Consulting, Inc. Prepared extensive analysis and evaluation of the material.
• Translating training materials from English into Arabic while working as consultant with STG, Inc. from February 2004 to October 2004. Subjects covered included everything from explosive ordinance disposal and computer forensic analysis to legal guidelines for setting up military and civilian IG offices. Also reviewed and analyzed various Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Tajik, Urdu, and German web news outlets, discussion forums and web broadcasters, providing translations, summaries, and detailed news and analysis reports on various current events and developments in the Middle East, Europe, Central Asia, and the Indian Subcontinent.
• Provided extensive Arabic-English classroom and in-the-field interpreting services to Saudi Arabian, UAE, and Kuwaiti government personnel attending various training courses in the United States, as well as Arabic-English translation and interpreting services at the US Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as a consultant for IntelData, Inc. from February 2003 to February 2004.
• Translating numerous attorney-client letters, memoranda and legal briefs, and providing telephone interpreting services to leading international law firms, including Pepper Hamilton LLP, Spears & Imes LLP, and Hunton & Williams LLP.
• Providing Arabic language web site maintenance and content authoring as consultant for PR firm Fleishman Hillard, Inc., including creation and editing of Arabic graphics in Adobe CS3 ME and Flash.
• Composed Arabic, Farsi, Dari, Tajik, and Urdu language lesson modules for SCOLA, Inc., which included verbatim video transcriptions and translations, vocabulary lists, and test questions, for use in universities throughout the United States and abroad, from November 2004 through March 2006. Materials covered include detailed local news reports and documentaries from Central Asia and the Arab world.
• Providing written Arabic translations of briefing materials designed to introduce visiting dignitaries from Arab countries to the workings of Congress and the Supreme Court for ASET, Inc.
• Marketing services and developing and maintaining business relationships through a broad range of contacts in the translation industry.
• Independently organizing, prioritizing, and distributing project work among collaboration team members, and conducting follow-up and supervision until completion of tasks.
• Providing cyber security consulting and threat analysis services to selected clients, with focus on the cyber threat landscapes of the wider Middle East, Central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent.
• Conducting continuous live internet monitoring searches for a broad spectrum of hostile cyber activities, including mass data dumps, leaks of credentials, postings of significant vulnerabilities, DDoS attacks, and open declarations of intent to launch cyber-attacks.
• Performing manual targeted internet searches according to specific cyber intelligence requirements specified by clients, especially SCADA attacks.
• Answering client-specific RFIs (“requests for intel”) on a wide range of cyber security-related topics, including the impact of newly released cyber security legislation in various countries on clients’ global business activities, predicted consequences of major vulnerabilities being leaked, and the impact of various political developments, upheaval incidents, etc. on client business interests.
• Monitoring, surveying, and conducting comparative analysis of forums frequented by Russian, Turkish, Azeri, Arab, Iranian, Israeli, South Asian, Central Asian, and Southeast Asian hackers.
• Identifying, profiling, and analyzing the skill levels, motivations, strategies, and operational methods of key malicious actors in various hacker communities, with particular focus on wider Middle Eastern, Russian, Indian Subcontinent, and Central Asian hacker communities, and publishing findings in the form of special reports.
• Assisting in the translation of documents, training materials, and other project-specific documentation for a variety of clients from English into Arabic, including clients receiving other services tangentially related to tactical cyber security services. Materials handled include high-importance contracts with a wide variety of globally active third parties.
• Evaluating the overall defensive cybersecurity posture of client organizations, and comparing it against the offensive cybersecurity posture of various cyber-threat actors from around the world as based on their skill and resource levels in developing novel types of malware (ransomware, Trojans, etc.), their motivations (e.g. political, “traditional cyber-crime, ” etc.), and any other cybersecurity-relevant factors.
• Participating in the formulation of client organizational cybersecurity strategy and defensive cybersecurity posture, including specific IT risk & cyber threat management policies, and ISMSs in a broader sense.
• Identifying international cyber threat actor communities in various online venues and participating in the formulation of operational strategies to monitor these threat actor communities, particularly for use by client Security Operations Centers.
• Participating in post-attack cyber investigations, including digital forensics analysis (from targeted systems, honeypots, etc.), and network traffic analysis, with the goal of assessing the scale / extent of compromise (how much data compromised, which data, location of data, and otherwise reconstructing the details of the entire attack evolution as much as possible, for analysis and cybersecurity strategy improvement purposes.
• Monitoring, surveying, and conducting threat assessment analysis of forums, chat room channels, and other online venues frequented by Russian, Turkish, Azeri, Arab, Iranian, Israeli, South Asian, Central Asian, and Southeast Asian hackers.
• Identifying, profiling, and analyzing the skill levels, motivations, strategies, and operational methods of key malicious actors in various hacker communities, with particular focus on wider Middle Eastern, Russian, Indian Subcontinent, and Central Asian hacker communities, and publishing findings in the form of special reports.
• Authoring strategic reports on international cyber security developments, with particular focus on the wider Middle East, Central Asia, and the Indian Subcontinent.
• Monitoring, surveying, and conducting comparative analysis of forums frequented by Turkish, Azeri, Arab, Iranian, Israeli, South Asian, and Southeast Asian hackers.
• Identifying, profiling, and analyzing the skill levels, motivations, strategies, operational methods, and interpersonal networks of key malicious actors in various hacker communities from Morocco to Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Central Asia, and the Indian Subcontinent.
• Collecting and analyzing hacking tools and malcode created by these hackers, in collaboration with malcode, vulnerability aggregation, reverse engineering, and other iDefense specialist teams as needed.
• Authoring regular Weekly Threat Report and News in Brief contributions on cyber-security events in Europe, the wider Middle East, Central Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, and Southeast Asia.
• Authoring cyber security-focused Global Threat Research Reports on Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, UAE, Egypt, and other countries throughout Central Asia, the Indian Subcontinent, and Europe, and assisting in preparing similar reports for China and other regions within the specialty of fellow analysts.
• Authoring broad nodal analysis study of militant Islamist and jihadist websites, with emphasis on the “cyber-jihad” sub-community frequenting these forums, analyzing their capabilities, trends, and skill levels.
• Authoring urgent priority cyber security analysis information requests from leading global private sector clients.
• Attending and presenting at national and international conferences on behalf of iDefense as required.
• Coordinating with and assisting the marketing teams with sales calls for various cyber security services, often using language abilities
• Single 10-minute GermanEnglish phone interpreting call with client resulted in sales of over USD 100, 000 in Verisign cyber security services.
• Interviewing, hiring, and managing in-country information contributors to assist in research on evolving cyber security threat landscape in their respective areas of expertise.
• Coordinating various machine translation, automated audio search, voice recognition, and OCR experiments with other companies involved in language research, including MITRE, BBN Technologies, and Sakhr Egypt.
• Designing flowcharts for automated input, OCR, and machine-translation process for millions of documents in Arabic, Farsi, and other languages, in close collaboration with programming and senior management staff.
• Designing flowcharts for semi-automatic and automatic digital audio cleanup processes used to automatically identify the language and transcribe the contents of audio files.
• Evaluating various machine translation and OCR software systems, including Sakhr OCR, Sakhr Enterprise Translation 5.0, Sakhr Johaina automated internet news collection and machine translation software suite, LanguageWeaver machine translation software, NovoDynamics OCR, Ciyasoft OCR, and other programs.
• Selecting Arabic-language documents and compiling Arabic transcriptions with English translations of them to be used as test corpora for experimental machine translation software.
• Acting as final English language QC authority for all machine translation and OCR test corpora.
• Authoring detailed performance metrics and testing procedures to evaluate OCR/OWR/OPR, machine translation, grammatical/morphological analysis, entity extraction, and automatic audio language ID & transcription systems, as well as designing test corpora for software testing & evaluation.
• Assisting in operation of language research lab in Tyson’s Corner, VA, including setting up and configuring HP blade servers and Cisco switches, and maintaining a log book of switch configurations and drop locations, and configuring specialized software and hardware used to conduct linguistics experiments.
Master of Science in Information Technology, with coursework in Cisco networking, Oracle database administration, JAVA programming, network security, and IT project management.
Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts and linguistics with concentration in Arabic, Farsi, and German.