Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Real-Time Computer-Based Translation in Iraq

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the remember-the-curse-of-the-babelfish dept.

[TheBORG] writes "The U.S. military has been testing software on laptops that translate English to Arabic and Arabic to English to have conversations with Iraqis without the need to have a Arabic linguist on hand. 'This year the military's Joint Forces Command has been testing laptops with such software in Iraq. When someone speaks into a microphone attached to the computer, the machine translates it into Arabic and reads that translation aloud over the PC's speakers. The software then translates the Arabic speaker's response and utters it in English.'" (See this related story from last year about this daunting machine-translation task.)

1 of 338 comments (clear)

  1. I bet it doesn't work too well. by Reality+Master+201 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You can probably have unbelievably simple conversations, like

    "Do you want to kill me?" "No."

    And for anything approximating a normal conversation, it's utterly fucking useless. Also, for the times when you actually need a very urgent, very good understanding of the language to prevent a lot of trouble, I bet it's beyond worthless.

    At present, and for the forseeable future, there's no adequate substitute for humans that speak the language. I realize we throw Arabic speakers out of the military because they're gay and all, but maybe we could make an exception because their skills are necessary at present. No computer translation system is adequate for usage in a live military operation.

    Oh, and IACL (I am A Computational Linguist).