Posted on 10/17/2006 9:08:38 PM PDT by World_Events
NORFOLK, Va. - The military is now using a Star Trek-like gadget in Iraq to help troops with no linguistic training communicate with civilians and Iraqis training for the country's emerging police and military forces.
Called the Two Way Speech-to-Speech Program, it's a translator that uses a computer to convert spoken English to Iraqi Arabic and vice versa.
While the program is technically still in the research and development stage, the Norfolk-based U.S. Joint Forces Command, in partnership with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has sent some 70 prototypes to Iraq where troops are using it in their tactical environments to evaluate how well it works.
So far, so good, said Wayne Richards, chief of the command's implementation branch.
The need for such a device was first reported in April 2004 when Joint Forces Command received an urgent request from commanders on the ground in Iraq, Richards said.
Soldiers on the ground needed to better communicate with the Iraqi population. But because of a shortage of linguists throughout the Defense Department, translators are hard to come by, even for the troops with what some are calling the most important job in Iraq today - training Iraq's police officer and military troops.
(Excerpt) Read more at newspress.com ...
Is C3PO available?
I'll bet in ten years every soldier will have a headset that does this, and play mp3s.
Ah, yes - the universal translator....works almost as well as a 45 Colt.
Methinks the troops would *rather* have a type 2 phasor.....
Plus, it seems that the average person is fluently in around four languages.
Hope it does better than babelfish
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