Now, I haven't done a great deal of research into the Linguistics area yet, but what I know about it right now is here:

It's pretty high-profile. Not only do you have to have a high enough qualifying score on the ASVAB (for memory, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery), but you also have to have a high enough score on the DLAB (Defense Language Aptitude Battery) exam, which was explained to me there in the office. Basically, you go in, are given a made-up language and the set of rules it operates under, and are given a certain (long) amount of time to translate what you can. In order to qualify, you must score at least a 100 on the test—and before you go "oh shit", the maximum score possible is 176. I'm going to see if I can take this test anyway, just to see. If I qualify, awesome. If not, at least I tried.

The careers, compared to the Air Force, seem to be a lot more varied. The Air Force listed a set of jobs where you basically sat behind a console at a wall monitor, with a set of headphones on, tuning in to various radio frequencies and monitoring/transcribing/translating the transmissions. There's some of that in the Navy, too, but they also listed face-to-face opportunities, such as diplomatic translator envoys, or participation in inter-country negotiations. And I thought that was really cool. If I do end up going this way, I'm going to see if I can learn either Russian or Mandarin Chinese. I consider myself to be very good with inflection nuances, and I would much rather learn to speak Chinese than Japanese, with its inundation of syllables accosting your ears every blamed sentence.

I don't know a whole lot about the schooling time for Linguist stuff, but according to the Navy website it's "...long and intensive, lasting more than a year in some cases." So it takes a bit. I imagine that means a slight pay grade increase, but I don't honestly know. At any rate, I would honestly say I would be pretty excited to be translating for the Navy; moreso because part of their job descriptions said "adhering to idiomatic meanings of phrases", which has been something that has really pissed me off about anime subtitles and early voice overdubs. I mean, in media, literal translations can certainly cause some humor, but in political negotiations you might make or break international rapport depending on the manner of your translating. That's pretty serious stuff.

I honestly wish I knew a bit more about this angle, but this is what I have right now. I think when I go back on Monday I'm going to ask about this a bit more, and maybe see if I can talk about what other fields I might qualify for besides linguistics and nuclear power, just for information's sake.