Machines Not Lost In Translation
The Phraselator is a handheld one-way translation device currently used by military personnel in the Middle East; the device is also being tested by U.S. law enforcement officials and corrections officers in 11 states and undergoing assessment in county health departments and hospital emergency rooms.
The device, which was developed with seed funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), allows users to speak or choose from a screen of English phrases and match those phrases to their pre-recorded foreign-language counterparts, and then broadcasts the foreign-language MP3 file and records replies for translation later on.
Phraselator voice modules are usually stored on secure 128 MB digital cards that can support as many as 12,000 phrases in four or five dialects, and a toolkit can be employed to download phrase modules from the Phraselator Web portal, which contains over 300,000 phrases.
Phraselator software developer Jack Buchanan says the software can translate voice into text with more than 70 percent accuracy, but notes that it is technically challenging to convert text into another language prior to outputting the data vocally. He also says the Phraselator is being programmed to translate limited two-way conversation in which responses correlate to a specific domain of words such as dates, numbers, or colors, while next-generation-Phraselators will also incorporate images.
Meanwhile, DARPA is funding the development of the multilingual automatic speech-to-speech translator (MASTOR) system, a bi-directional voice translator from IBM that can extract content from each sentence and match it to a comparable sentence in another language via algorithms.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from Wired News (03/09/05); Harrison, Ann .