From the news item:

Wartime military patrols and civilian encounters can be especially dangerous if neither group understands the other’s language. To help American forces secure critical information and communicate with the local population, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers are evaluating prototype, real-time, two-way translation systems for the Defense Advance Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

The DARPA program called TRANSTAC (Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use) currently focuses on English and Iraqi Arabic. From July 16 to 20, NIST ran a series of laboratory and outdoor evaluation tests on prototype systems with English-speaking U.S. Marines and Iraqi Arabic speakers at its Gaithersburg, Md. campus. In each of the exercises NIST measured system capabilities in speech recognition, machine translation, noise robustness, user interface design and efficient performance on limited hardware platforms.

Source: NIST

This entry was posted on Friday, July 27th, 2007 at 12:59 am and is filed under Information Industry, Information Science, Search News, Technology and Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.