Devices to Help Soldiers Speak in Tongues

June 13, 2002 -- 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.

Building It Up

As Marine Acoustics continues to refine it, the Phraselator will become a much more useful tool, Sarich says. He hopes the device will develop further as it's given a trial by fire in the war against terrorism.

For example, the devices sent for field trials contain roughly 2,000 to 4,000 phrases in up to four languages, including Arabic, Urdu, Pashto and Dari. Most of those phrases are keyed to specific circumstances, such as "force-protection" and security, which limited the initial use of the tool for checkpoints and guarding prisoners.

But Sarich says he has been busy working on building out the Phraselator system.

"We have a kit that allows [soldiers] to build their own modules," he says.

And as he carries out trials in Afghanistan, Sarich says he's had several opportunities to help soldiers do just that. In one instance, he says he helped a nurse at an American base develop a module to help communicate medical information. "We brought one over and had a Pashto linguist do the voice-overs for about 400-plus medical phrases."

On the Road to a Two-Way Translator

But perhaps the biggest limitation of the Phraselator is that it is a one-way device. The unit can only understand and translate spoken English. It can't be used to translate someone's foreign-language response back into English — yet.

Sarich and other researchers under the DARPA Babylon project are still working toward that goal: Creating a handheld device that can listen to and translate two very different languages seamlessly, just like a human linguist.

"The fact of the matter is, that's a real hard problem," says Sarich.

The key issue, he says, is that both languages would need their own speech-recognition engine and look-up tables. That way, the computer wouldn't get confused about what language it was "hearing."

And in order to process all that information — especially across a wide range of vocabulary — the computer would have to have to be pretty hefty. "We have to have a lot of processing power," says Sarich.

Still, others note that it's not an impossible task.

For example, Ectaco, a company in Long Island City, N.Y., that makes handheld electronic dictionaries for travelers, recently introduced a device that can translate between English and Russian. But it required the work of many people, mostly linguists, to provide the digital data.

"We have over 100 people in St. Petersburg, Russia, working on this product," says Anatoly Kissem, president of Voice Methods, the unit of Ectaco that is responsible for developing the electronic English-Russian translator. "It is significantly more difficult to do [than a one-way translator]," he says.

And while Kissem says Ectaco isn't yet part of the DARPA Babylon project, he hopes the company can get involved with it soon."It's very important for all of us to continue and improve on the devices," says Kissem.

According to published Babylon project reports, DARPA hopes teams involved in Babylon will have working prototypes of two-way electronic translators within 18 months.