Digital World Tokyo: US military to use IBM Arabic translation gear in Iraq

October 17 2006

Something really cool out of IBM research, called MASTOR.  Looks like the babelfish in your ear is becoming reality on the battlefield...

When used in Iraq, Mastor will act as an automated bi-directional, English-to-Iraqi Arabic translator capable of translating more than 50,000 English words and 100,000 Iraqi Arabic words.

For example, a U.S. military trainer looking to work with an Iraqi policeman could speak English into a microphone hooked up to the Mastor system running on a laptop. The IBM technology would recognize his English speech, translate it into Iraqi Arabic and then vocalize that translation for the Iraqi policeman to hear and vice versa. Mastor's graphical user interface displays both the original and translated phrase. It also includes what IBM calls a "back translation" of the individual words the system translated, to provide an additional level of confidence to the original speaker.
More on MASTOR also on the business2blog.

Link: Digital World Tokyo: US military to use IBM Arabic translation gear in Iraq > (Thanks, Charles)

Ed Brill | Highland Park, IL USA Category:  IBM  Add/View Comments [15]

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  1. 1  Nathan T. Freeman http://www.openntf.org/nathan/escape.nsf | 10/17/2006 11:21:01 AM

    Hrmmm... Reality 2.0. Cool stuff.

    I wonder if that GUI interface is called the { Link } Mastor Control Program?

  1. 2  Volker Weber http://vowe.net | 10/17/2006 11:41:19 AM

    Let's hope this works better than VoiceType. :-)

  1. 3  Ports http://www.mrports.com/ | 10/17/2006 1:41:55 PM

    Or is it ViaVoice?

  1. 4  Gennady  | 10/17/2006 7:24:23 PM

    One of the tests of the quality of computer translation is to translate a sentence from one language into another and back into original language without loosing the meaning.

    One of the well known test was to translate the expression "Out of sight out of mind" into Russian and then back into English.

    The outcome was :

    "Blind and stupid"

    I have tried to repeat the above test on { Link }

    I entered: "Out of sight out of mind" and translated it into Spanish: "Fuera de vista fuera de la mente".

    Then I copied Spanish text into translate field and translated it back into English.

    The result was:

    "Outside Vista outside the mind".

    This is a clear proof of Microsoft conspiracy!

  1. 5  Ed Brill http://www.edbrill.com | 10/17/2006 11:30:20 PM

    @2 / @3 - clearly, this is way beyond ViaVoice kinds of things. The articles on the IBM Research site (powered by Domino :-) ) show how serious this technology is, and how it will make its way into the market more and more over time.

    @4 -- LOL

  1. 6  Ian Randall http://www.emsoft.com.au | 10/18/2006 12:19:45 AM

    Brilliant...

    Now all we need to do is find a way to train military personnel to walk erect and speak english.

  1. 7  Flemming Riis  | 10/18/2006 4:07:57 AM

    Does it fit on a laptop ? or is there non mobile hardware requriments

  1. 8  Flemming Riis  | 10/18/2006 4:21:55 AM

    -Initially, IBM will deliver 35 ruggedized Panasonic Toughbook laptops loaded with the Mastor software to USJFCOM in Iraq later this month.

    note to self : must read whole article :)

  1. 9  Ben Rose http://None | 10/18/2006 4:26:59 AM

    And if the worst happens, they can always throw overheated notebook batteries at the enemy.

  1. 10  Bill Geimer  | 10/18/2006 12:40:19 PM

    @1 - I think the tron writers spent as much time as I did on Burroughs medium and large systems, where the O/S was referred to as MCP. Good catch though. I have not see it years.

    @all - absolutely, freaking sci-fi level cool. Make that "Restaurant at the End of the Universe" cool.

  1. 11  Randall Shimizu  | 10/18/2006 2:32:44 PM

    It's amazing that Microsoft claims they are the leader in speech technology when IBM has a technology like this. Microsoft is roughly where IBM was ten years ago with OS/2.

  1. 12  Scott Gentzen http://www.scottandmargo.net | 10/18/2006 2:35:30 PM

    Ben @9 - Those Toughbooks are good for personal defense when out of ammo too.

  1. 13  Charles Robinson http://cubert-codepoet.blogspot.com | 10/18/2006 3:15:25 PM

    I honestly don't remember how I stumbled across this, but the first thing I thought was that it's taking collaboration to a whole new place (figuratively as well as literally). I imagine we'll eventually see the tag line "Sametime - any language, realtime."

  1. 14  Randall Shimizu  | 10/20/2006 4:09:17 AM

    @13

    I agree it's a natural fit for Sametime. I just wish IBM would accelerate it's implementation of it's innovations. Really don't understand why IBM does not get a jump on Microsoft and release ahead of time. All this stuff with MS Office communicator is not really that innovative. It's beyond me why IBM has waited to implement the voip features in gui format in Sametime.

  1. 15  Elena Temnova  | 11/13/2006 4:13:26 AM

    The back translation would never be a proper test for a machine translation, since errors accumulate with each translation. An insignificant mistake which lets, however, to understand the proper meaning of a phrase, can produce a more serious mistake in the text translated back into the original language. There is a children game called in Russian "corrupted phone" - a same phrase is communicated from one person to another, and at the end of the chain you will hear something quite different from the initial text. With MT back translation, you will see the same effect.