Navy Unveils Polyglot Chat For Iraq

An anonymous reader writes "According to ScienceBlog, the U.S. Office of Naval Research, trying to keep friendly armies in Iraq from accidentally blowing each other to smithereens, is helping create software that connects instant messaging (IM) with machine translation (MT). The result: Chat software to be used in Iraq that automatically translates your messages into the correct language of the reader, called the the Coalition Chat Line - it's 'getting rave reviews from U.S. and allied-coalition personnel.'"

Comments

Machine translation?

[robslimo]

Given the quirks of babelfish and similar, I hope poor, mangled machine translations don't cause more negative incidents than they prevent.

Yikes!

[pubjames]

The article starts with a question:

So how do you get soldiers and commanders speaking different languages in a theater of war to communicate effectively and not, for example, blow each other up mistakenly?

I think there is a simple answer to that question - use human translators! I would never trust a machine translation with my life.

I speak a second language to reasonably high standard, and so I realise that languages can be really subtle things. Sometimes things just don't translate directly, and they need interpretation e.g.

Non-English speaking soldier How's the new weapon system working?

US soldier It's hot! Damn hot!

Non-English speaking soldier Oh dear! It shouldn't be hot! You must stop using it immediately!

US soldier No I mean it rocks!

Non-English speaking soldier It's fastenings are insecure? Sounds like we should send an engineer immediately! Please cease using it!

Re:Yikes!

[pubjames]

Solution: A sticker across the top of the device in all appropriate languages: "AVOID USE OF SLANG". Well, that's a partial solution. You also have to not hand it to an idiot.

But the problem isn't just slang.

I have taught languages, and one of the things that you realise is that people that don't speak a second language actually have a hard time analysing languages and realising what is colloquial, for instance, or when a sentence is simple for a foreign language speaker and when it isn't.

So many English speakers will think a sentence like "we've been set up" is very simple, because it uses little words, whereas many who have English as a second language would find it difficult to understand. ("Set up" is a phrasal verb, the "up" completely changes the meaning of the verb "set").

Re:Just teach everybody the Aggressor Language.

[forand]

How can you think Esperanto is a neutral language?! It is compose solely of romanctic languages! I just watched Incubus(the only movie made in Esperanto and it has William Shattner) and you can pretty much undestand it if you know english and some french/italian/spanish(choose one) now for someone who doesn't speak a romantic language learning this is not going to be easy. Also forcing a culture to learn your language is not the way to make friends.

Re:Just teach everybody the Aggressor Language.

[Zathrus]

Esperanto can be taught in just a month or two

Really? To anyone? I suspect that non-Western language speakers, like virtually anyone in Asia, might disagree. As well as those with rather esoteric languages like Hungarian.

And as for those who speak languages that are similar to Esperanto (namely any Germanic or Romantic derived language) could learn any given langugage "in just a month or two, to a level allowing excellent communications".

doesn't help face to face

Which is why we have personal translators for that situation, which do exist and do work. You can even get them for civilian use.

Esperanto was dead before it was even born. It doesn't evolve with any civilization and so lacks terminology that comes into usage over time. And, heck, if we want to pick a popular "neutral" language, then Klingon beats Esperanto for number of speakers. Yes. It is that silly.

Canadian Peacekeepers

[DR SoB]

Well, since in the last 10 years only 4 Canadians have died as a result of direct military combat, all 4 of them the result of US Friendly fire, will it translate Canadian to American as well? Oh wait, I guess we all speak English.. So much for that..

Re:Finally!

[SuperBanana]

The US and UK troops will be able to understand each other! Two nations no longer divided by a common language

Joke as you will, but we shot down more British soldiers due to stupid screw ups than were shot by Iraqis. Maybe instead of translators, we should be writing control systems for our automated missile defense systems that don't suck, and putting someone a little more responsible and trained than 18 year old dropouts at the controls. In at least one incident, it was because Patriot missile batteries kept identifying helicopters and planes as inbound missiles. If the operator doesn't stop it after about 10 seconds, the battery fires a missile by itself. Two harriers and at least one helicopter(I believe it had close to 30 British troops on board) were shot down that way. Nobody survived.

It's pretty fucking embarrassing that our troops and their computer systems can't tell the difference between a helicopter and a missile traveling at nearly the speed of sound, and that a system which was routinely proven to have unacceptable friendly-fire targeting problems was deployed so heavily(and when problems surfaced as expected, to meet a threat that didn't exist, the systems were not shut off). As always, technology is being hauled in to solve a problem other technology and sheer incompetence created.