Scott Nicholas
A Raytheon subsidiary has received a $4 million contract to provide one-year automatic speech and optical character recognition, text-to-speech and machine translation software licenses to the U.S. Army.
Raytheon BBN Technologies will also help the Army’s Machine Foreign Language Translation System Program Office field a system for military personnel to communicate with Arabic and Pashto speakers from Iraq as well as understand documents and digital media written in foreign languages, the company said Monday.
The Army launched its Machine Foreign Language Translation System program in 2011 as part of efforts to increase language translation capacity for the service branch’s echelons.
MFLTS is designed to integrate with Android handheld devices, battallion-level intelligence systems and Windows server-based systems and laptops.
“Our military needs to converse with foreign language speakers and understand the situation around them,” said Martha Lillie, MFLTS program manager at Raytheon BBN Technologies.
Lillie added the company seeks to equip the Army with tools that can help military personnel fluently converse, share information and comprehend printed materials in foreign languages.
