Raytheon Subsidiary to Develop Army Mobile Translation System
Raytheon‘s BBN Technologies subsidiary will develop a two-way communication and translation system for U.S. Army portable, mobile and net-enabled devices, Raytheon announced Tuesday.
Under a $5.5 million contract, BBN will work to enable users to translate speech and printed or electronic text. BBN will initially develop the system’s software architecture and test the technology’s performance in prototypes for the three platforms.
“There simply are not enough human translators available to meet the Army’s needs and previous translation devices have restricted users to a selection of canned phrases,” said Prem Natarajan, head of the speech, language and multimedia processing unit at Raytheon BBN Technologies.
In fall 2011, Raytheon released a translation application for mobile Android devices, aiming to provide the Army with 30,000 words from Afghanistan’s major languages and 80,000 in Iraqi Arabic.
Also in the fall, SAIC Inc. released linguistics software and software-as-a-service with plans for an iPhone application that could encode the grammar and meanings of language. The iPhone app will generate vocal readings of words in Arabic, Spanish and English.
Posted by Gino Troiani
on Tuesday, January 17th, 2012. Filed under News.
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