Remember those Star Trek translator devices on TV? Well, U.S. forces actually have something in Iraq called "The Phraselator" - and it works. Phil Carter has the details from the field, and notes that VoxTec will be marketing civilian spinoffs soon.
Remember those Star Trek translator devices on TV? Well, U.S. forces actually have something in Iraq called "The Phraselator" - and it works. Phil Carter has the details from the field, and notes that VoxTec will be marketing civilian spinoffs soon.
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Best application of the "universal translator": There was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which an alien life form -- consisting of an intelligent matrix of some biomaterial suspended in a thin layer of saline in the geology of some planet -- addressed the Enterprise crew as "ugly bags of mostly water." Lt. Commander Data confirmed that this was not an unreasonable description of humans from the perspective of an intelligent matrix. Indeed, I definitely know and even transact with the occasional ugly bag of mostly water.
Yeah, that toy titillates my gadget and linguistic geeklust to the utmost.
Somewhat old news. This is a DARPA project that was first deployed in Afghanistan in late '01 - early '02.
"My hovercraft is full of eels." ;-)
I think it is great they are using the Phraselator. But the problem is that it is necessary in the first place. While it is far better than nothing a one-way translation device is a poor substitute for native language fluency.
I've blogged on this a number of times. The US can't do a very good job running an occupation and an effective counter-insurgency in an Arab country without a lot more Arabic fluency in its soldiers. One batallion of the 4th ID didn't get a translator until January 2004. We are talking a whole batallion. Not a company. Not a platoon. The language barrier has caused US forces to underestimate the amount of hostility they were facing in Iraq.