U.S. forces in Iraq to test IBM translation device

[ECH1969]

The U.S. military may soon be able to communicate better with Iraqis in their own language, thanks to technology developed by IBM that quickly translates spoken English into Iraqi Arabic.

The technology could help the military overcome a major hurdle in Iraq, which is the inability of most troops to speak Arabic beyond basic phrases, and a shortage of interpreters, International Business Machines Corp. and military officials said.

IBM of Armonk, New York, has long been developing speech recognition and translation technology for potential uses in commercial, consumer and military applications.

The technology being deployed in Iraq, called multilingual automatic speech-to-speech translator, or Mastor, has been in development since 2001, said David Nahamoo, chief technology officer for human language technologies at IBM's research business.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/tech/20061011-2101-tech-ibm-iraq.html