During his years at Yale in the 1930s and 1940s, he was a close associate of Edward Sapir, Morris Swadesh, Benjamin Lee Whorf, Charles Hockett, and after 1941, Leonard Bloomfield.
Like Sapir and Swadesh, he was a consultant of the International Auxiliary Language Association, which presented Interlingua in 1951.
[2] In the 1950s, Trager worked at the Foreign Service Institute of the Department of State, helping to train diplomats prior to their departure abroad.
He worked there with Edward T. Hall, Henry Lee Smith, Charles F. Hockett, and Ray Birdwhistell.
(For details, see George Leonard Trager by Charles F. Hockett, Language, Vol.