A nonprofit research institute called SRI has been developing interpretation software for the US Department of Defense. Thirty-two units of the the two-way translation system called IraqComm have been shipped to Iraq, where U.S. military personnel are testing them in the field.
IraqComm's vocabulary of 40,000 words in English and 50,000 in Iraqi Arabic is designed to enable soldiers or medics to converse with civilians in a limited range of settings such as military checkpoints, door-to-door searches or first-aid situations.
While less than perfect, IraqComm provides rudimentary interpretation, at least under favorable conditions -- no one shooting or shouting, and both parties speaking in short sentences that were relatively easy for the computer to interpret.
The use of machine translation technology -- combined with cutting edge TTS (text-to-speech) and STT (speech-to-text) technologies -- have yielded a new generation of machine interpreters. The 9.11 attacks have moved the DoD and other federal agencies in the US to pour resources into machine translation, stressing Arabic and languages such as Pashto and Dari, which are spoken in parts of Afghanistan.
SRI's IraqComm project follows an earlier Defense contract under which a simpler, one-way device called the Phraselator was developed. It is a rugged handheld device equipped with a good microphone and a loudspeaker. The Phraselator was initially designed to recognize 800 to 1,000 utterances in English. It could be loaded with the equivalent phrases in any language -- as long as the words were recorded by a human translator.
The Phraselator would "hear" the English speaker and render the appropriate translation. The Phraselator was first delivered to U.S. forces in Afghanistan in April 2002, loaded with Pashto and Dari. The one-way device allowed soldiers at checkpoints, for instance, to ask civilians for their identification. Prior to this, soldiers got ID from people by motioning them onto the ground and fishing through their belongings.
The Phraselator has since been loaded with many languages, including Iraqi Arabic, and is being used in a variety of military and civilian applications.
The two-way translation ability of IraqComm -- though limited in its range of topics -- still represents a big advance. Assuming the field tests on the 32 units pan out, the technology could be widely deployed in places where human interpreters are scarce, are scared to work with American forces or are perhaps not entirely trusted.
According to David Grunwald, CEO of Global Translations, improvements in machine translation and TTS/STT technologies are paving the way to a new generation of communications devices that will bridge the language gap dramatically. "It's easy to imagine a day in the not so distant future where people will be able to maintain fluent conversations in foreign countries using their mobile telephone, iPOD or PDA," said Grunwald in a recent interview.
Source: SF Chronicle
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