Raytheon BBN Technologies has taken in $17 million from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to use in developing rapid translation software to apply to Arabic and Chinese news sources.
The funds are part of the Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program, which aims to translate speech and text in several languages using software that, by the end of the five-year program, will be 90 percent accurate. The company noted in a press release today that it is developing the software to automatically translate foreign-language text and broadcast news into English.
The GALE program employs speech and language scientists, as well as global researchers. The translation developments are intended to find the best language translation while accounting for different dialects and speakers.
See: MHT
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When the defense industry/department invests heavily in MT technology, things will happen. Nothing like "war" to advance technology (unfortunately). For the Internet, sex has the same driving effect. I am sure that at the end of this program, the DARPA MT software will be the best in the world, and if/when this technology is allowed to benefit the civilian sphere at some point, it will really make a difference. The race is already on, all the big software companies also work on similar technologies. Good thing translation is not sexy, or the sex industry would have developed perfect MT technology years ago, eradicating human translators, LOL!
LOL: Siemens abandoned many years ago a very similar project because it was a total failure with a loss of millions of DM. I guess the MT application was not sexy enough!
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