War-Zone Test for Babel-Fish Tool

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Mr Kleen
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War-Zone Test for Babel-Fish Tool

Post by Mr Kleen »

Even in a work environment as unsafe as modern Iraq, the job of a war-zone translator stands out as exceptionally dangerous.

Dozens of interpreters hired to work with U.S. troops have died in the course of the war, victims of combat or targets for assassination. To date, the principal tools-of-the-trade are body armor and a firearm.

The risky business of battle-zone translation could get a technological boost, however, as researchers prepare to test a system that instantly translates spoken conversations to and from English and Iraqi Arabic.

Funded by Darpa, the system would allow troops to communicate in Arabic through a laptop computer equipped with voice recognition and translation software. Troops could speak in English and have their words instantly translated into Iraqi Arabic, "spoken" by a computerized man's voice. The program also translates Arabic into English.

"Will it replace the need for an interpreter when you're having some sort of high-level conversation? Absolutely not," said Kristin Precoda, speech technology research lab director at SRI International and one of the developers of the program that got underway in May. "But it is absolutely to the point where it could be useful in some carefully chosen situations."

The effort to combine machine translation and voice recognition, a project Darpa calls TranTac, is an extension of earlier research spearheaded by SRI that culminated in the Phraselator. That device, essentially a PDA programmed to translate English phrases into other languages, is widely used by troops and medical workers in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But the Phraselator still has serious limitations, Precoda said. It can be impractical in countries with low literacy rates, such as Afghanistan. Additionally, many people are unfamiliar with the PDA interface.

Spoken translation technology gets around these issues. It's fast, the user doesn't have to look at a screen, and it can work for conversations between people several feet away. However, it also presents a potentially more daunting set of concerns, especially for use in Iraq.

A key challenge for developers is working with the vernacular form of Arabic spoken in Iraq. Modern Standard Arabic, the dialect used in broadcasts and writing, is very different from Iraqi Arabic, Precoda said.

"In Arabic, it really is as if you speak one language and write another," she said. Formal rules for writing Iraqi Arabic are lacking, making it difficult to develop translation software. Another issue is that the program must work for speakers with very different voices. Many voice-recognition programs work best when "trained" for use with a particular person's voice and accent.

Still, demand for better translation technology appears strong, given that troops stationed in Iraq typically have limited Arabic vocabularies, Precoda noted. "They can say things like, 'Please' and 'Thank you' and 'Open your trunk,'" she said.

Moreover, machine translation technology is much better than it was a few years ago, said Bryce Benjamin, CEO of Language Weaver, one of the firms working on the Darpa project. The company uses a statistical approach to translation, in which a computer analyzes the probability of a given phrase among several possible interpretations.

But even the best computerized translation is still prone to errors. At worst, a single botched translation can spur a string of miscommunications.

"No one in the military would make life or death decisions based on a machine translation," Benjamin said. But when you have to sift through lots of information quickly, "it's an extremely effective triage device."

Darpa has requested $10 million to fund the TransTac project in the 2006 fiscal year, which began in October. The military does not envision machine-translation devices replacing human translators, but sees them as a supplement, said Jan Walker, a Darpa spokeswoman.

The devices could be used when no human translator is available. In other cases, Walker wrote in an e-mail, "a machine translation device may be more 'trusted' than relying on a local civilian to translate."

Precoda said the voice-to-voice translation technology could be put to the test in Iraq as early as this summer, but no timeline has been fixed.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0, ... _tophead_4
office8639

Hmmm...

Post by office8639 »

Mr Kleen wrote:Even in a work environment as unsafe as modern Iraq, the job of a war-zone translator stands out as exceptionally dangerous.
interesting :)
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