Devices to Help Soldiers Speak in Tongues

June 13 -- For tourists and travelers visiting a foreign land, not knowing the local lingo is usually a forgivable sin. But unfortunately, soldiers in hostile countries don't have the luxury of being ignorant of area dialects.

To protect themselves and innocent noncombatants, soldiers must be able to communicate clearly commands such as "Halt or I'll shoot," or even non-threatening information such as "We are here to help you."

And for American troops in Afghanistan, conveying such concepts in languages such as Urdu, Pashto and Dari can be tricky without the help of a human translator.

But high-tech help may be at hand — literally.

A Talking Pocket Translator

Marine Acoustics Inc., a private company in Middletown, R.I., is one of several companies working on electronic language translators that can help soldiers — and eventually tourists and travelers — get their point across like a native.

The company's Phraselator is a handheld computer that was developed with funding from Babylon, a project of the U.S. military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

The Phraselator uses a speech-recognition engine — software designed to recognize spoken English — to help it function like a human translator. And how it works is fairly simple.

Interpretive Speech

A soldier merely speaks a simple phrase into the computer's microphone and the speech engine automatically translates the audio into digital codes. The computer's processor analyzes the codes and compares them to a table of codes that represent foreign words stored in the computer's memory.

The company says it takes about a second or two for the Phraselator to find the matching foreign words and come up with the appropriate phrase.

The translated phrase is displayed on the computer's screen and also played back through the computer's speaker using pre-recorded samples of the foreign words.

Ace Sarich, the primary developer of Phraselator, says the device was still under prototype earlier this year. But he says that after the tragic events of Sept. 11, DARPA asked the company to speed up development in order to support the troops involved with Operation Enduring Freedom.