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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Don't look for your tattered dictionary -- just pull out the Phraselator!
Apr 7, 2003 | Ace Sarich, a Vietnam vet and former Navy SEAL, caught the last commercial flight out of Kuwait City, Kuwait, on March 19, before the American and British invasion of Iraq began the next day.
He'd spent two weeks visiting military encampments up and down the border, training soldiers, military police and medical personnel on how to talk to Iraqis in their own language without speaking a word of Arabic.
Sarich is the vice president of VoxTec in Annapolis, Md., a division of Marine Acoustics, a military contractor. He was in Kuwait training troops to use a handheld device called the "Phraselator," a one-way language translator that's the size of a large PDA and weighs about a pound.
The Phraselator operates like an audio version of a tourist phrasebook. It's loaded with hundreds of stock phrases such as: "Halt." "Put your hands above your head." "Sit down." "Open your bag." " Show me your identification." "Do you speak English?" and the all-purpose: "We are the U.S. military. We are here to help you."
Speak one of these sentences into the device, or choose the phrase from a menu with a stylus, and the Phraselator emits a prerecorded Arabic translation. About 100 of the one-way speech machines are deployed in the current conflict at a cost of more than $2,000 per device. Different modules can be loaded into the device depending on the language encountered or the task at hand.
The Phraselator uses speech-recognition technology called Dynaspeak, developed by SRI International. It recognizes phrases phonetically, and then matches them to the prerecorded Arabic phrases. It's a nifty idea, and to some wistful thinkers, it offers a vision of Star Trek-ish universal translators that will eventually make all language barriers disappear. But we're still a long way from that future -- the Phraselator doesn't yet signify the long hoped-for breakthrough in machine translation sought after by generations of artificial-intelligence researchers. Instead, it's a step along the way, a little piece of the puzzle. It's also a sign that where once Cold War dynamics and the space race pushed new technological advances, now it's the war on terrorism that is spurring research forward.
"This is not attempting to solve the problem of general translation," says Horacio Franco, a developer at SRI International who worked on the device. "This addresses a specific need, when you really want to do something very constrained."
The Phraselator first saw battle in Afghanistan, where it communicated in four different languages: Pashtu, Dari, Urdu, and Arabic. In Kandahar, Army military police used it to communicate with prisoners of war. Troops requested Russian and Chinese modules to communicate with detainees.
Since the war in Iraq began, Sarich has received e-mail from troops who've put the device to use on the battlefield. One Army soldier with the Special Forces wrote that he'd used it to communicate with some children in Basra who were able to clue him in to the location of a weapons cache. The device has also made cameo appearances in some news reports from the front.
