You must already have a clearance, so most contractor linguists are military linguists who just retired or separated at the end of their enlistment contract. The govt pays Contractor companies to supply linguists. These are basically the Temp Workers of the Dept of Defense. Many either have or end up with PhDs in Chinese. To the best of my knowledge, government DoD linguists must already know the language. I'm not that familiar with how one becomes a government-employed DoD linguist. Other languages can go to San Antonio, or Augusta, GA, or maybe other places.I'm not clear on other languages. For the Navy, Air Force, and Marines, that is DC, Hawaii, northern Japan, or South Korea. For the Army, that is either DC or Hawaii. After you graduate from DLI, you go to Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo, TX for your technical training, which is generally about 6 months.ДЄfter that, you are sent to your first duty station. I regret I didn't take advantage of that area as much as I could have and should have. DLI is in Monterey, California.a beautiful place to live. The harder the language, the longer you are there. If you choose to become a linguist, you are sent to the Defense Language Institute where you are trained in the assigned language for anywhere between a few months and 15 months. You can request what language you want, but there is no guarantee you will get your request, because the needs of the military always come first. You generally need at least a 100 to be able to study Cat IV languages (Chinese-Mandarin, Korean, and Persian-Farsi). The higher you score, the more difficult language you can study. If you score well, you earn the option of becoming a linguist. During that test, they teach you progressively more complex rules of three made-up languages. Based on your aptitude tests, you might be given the chance to take the Defense Language Aptitude Battery. There are three types of DoD linguists: military, government, and contractor.ДЇor a military linguist, normally you start with nothing. But it takes 7 or more years of experience to get to that point, and your language has to advance along with the experience. There are some opportunities for truly advanced language skills, but even with those, you will probably max out at $105k to maybe as much as $115k/year. So if you work in DC, your salary will start at maybe $50-60k/year, and you will max out at probably $90k. You can have a comfortable living even with fairly low language skills, but you really can't go that high (unless you switch over to a leadership track.but that's another topic). You are being paid to use your skill (translation from Chinese to English) without any responsibility or opportunity to use judgment. You aren't being paid to use your brain all that much. To be blunt, a DoD linguist really is just a skilled laborer. Needing money (which is why bankruptcy or inability to handle money matters), ideological dislike of the US govt or attraction to another nation/ideology (like communism), being unreliable (which is why drug use matters), and blackmail (which is why secrets you don't tell the govt that they discover by investigating you matter). The things that tend to cause people to betray the nation are:

So if you have any problems in your past, it is best to be up-front and honest. Basically, the US Govt wants to know they can trust you with secrets. There are no hard-and-fast disqualifiers for getting a clearance that I'm aware of: I know people who have used hard drugs and still got their clearance, and others who have gone into bankruptcy and still obtained a clearance, and others with extensive foreign contacts/connections who still got their clearance.even though any of these can disqualify you.

Regardless of the job, you generally need to be able to obtain a clearance.

I almost don't know where to start.ДЇirst off, there are probably three different main areas within which you can work as a Chinese linguist for the US government.

Linguist jobs military