The accomplishments of James Child, a Senior Language Research Analyst at the National Cryptologic School, have arguably affected every single government linguist since the 1970s. Anyone seeking government language employment must pass a language proficiency test; government language analysts must periodically retest to prove professional proficiency; and language instructors rely upon standardized language-level criteria to teach students. All can thank Child for the form and substance of this testing and instruction.
Child provided powerful direction of NSA’s language testing program as well as governmental and academic proficiency testing efforts. He pioneered machine-scoreable formats that are now standard for most written foreign language tests used at NSA, forms that also served as models for other federal agencies.
One beneficiary of Mr. Child’s contributions was NSA’s Career Development Program. From the 1970s to 2000 the Language Professional Qualification Examination (LPQE) owed its design and evaluation procedures to his research. Child provided guidance to exam committees for roughly 50 languages, and this examination remains the key element of the program’s professional certification effort.
Child also created the Standard Proficiency Entry Level 2 testing program, the basis for hiring NSA linguists in the 1980s and 1990s. His influential 1987 paper profoundly influenced testing and curriculum development at the Defense Language Institute (DLI) and NSA. His innovative thinking was adopted by the Office of Personnel Management to set government-wide language proficiency standards. Even the Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ embraced his methodology.
Two of Child’s inventions were particularly remarkable. Text typology, now in wide use throughout the United States, enabled the use of authentic foreign language passages in both teaching and testing. Secondly, Child’s weighted-error methodology for grading translation examinations was also groundbreaking. This procedure enabled government and academic language institutions to assess translator proficiency with a high degree of reliability.
Child’s lasting contribution to NSA—already recognized by government and academia—was the revolution he launched in language instruction and testing, as well as the specific tools to maintain proficiency standards.
James R. Child was inducted into NSA's Cryptologic Hall of Honor in 2024. The Cryptologic Hall of Honor was created in 1999 to pay special tribute to the pioneers and heroes who rendered distinguished service to American cryptology.