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