It’s been a white whale for the Army during a decade at war: building a translator that can let English-only troops communicate with Arabic, Dari and Pashto speakers in war zones. Now a huge defense contractor think it’s speared the elusive quarry — in app form.
Martha Lillie, a business manager at defense giant Raytheon, picks up a no-frills Motorola Atrix from a table at Raytheon’s booth at the Association of the United States Army’s annual conference in Washington, D.C. She loads an application, presses her thumb on the Atrix’s touchscreen and moves the phone close to her mouth. “Where are you going?” she asks.
Lillie passes the phone to her Pashto-speaking colleague, Ubaidullah Tokhi. The phone barks back a phrase in Pashto. Tokhi grips the phone and speaks something into it in his native language. A calm electronic voice soon follows: “I am going into the city.”
That’s TransTalk, a Raytheon translation app. It’s got a vocabulary of up to 30,000 words in Afghanistan’s major languages, and another 80,000 in Iraqi Arabic, all geared toward translating phrases and questions that soldiers on patrol and stationed at checkpoints use every day. Raytheon hopes that the Army will include it in the ground service’s forthcoming App Marketplace.
It’s a project that’s been a long time in coming — even though rudimentary speech-and-text translators are already available in the App Store and the Android Market. The Pentagon’s far-out research agency, Darpa, has funded overlapping programs for text and speech translation over the last 10 years, from semantic models so sophisticated they’ll (allegedly) be able to understand foreign slang to translatorsthat can filter out background noise to foreign document readers. TransTalk is the child of one of those programs, known as Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use, orTRANSTAC.
The fact that TransTalk is an app — built for an Android device — reflects a gamble by Raytheon. The Army is crazy about smartphones, hoping to one day issue each soldier a secure phone like it does a rifle, and has recently revamped a long-standing program for networking dismounted soldiers to run on a smartphone-like device. (It’s smart, loaded with data, just not a phone.) The smartest way to convince the Army that it should buy your translation tool is to forget about building a new piece of hardware to host it on.
That is, if the Army doesn’t run out of money before it can get its smartphone plans off the ground. The Army hasn’t yet figured out how to secure its data; what sort of phone it should require soldiers to get; or whether it should just give soldiers a stipend to buy their (Army-approved) device of choice. So far, the Army is inclining toward the Android operating system, rather than iOS or Windows, but you never know.
Raytheon figures an Android app is the way to go for TransTalk — a bulkier version of which Raytheon showed off last year. (There’s no iOS equivalent.) But anyone even remotely familiar with online or mobile communications will understand TransTalk pretty quickly. The interface is just two buttons with flags denoting the language lined up to be translated. A conversation isn’t just spoken aloud, it’s stored and is displayed like an Instant Message convo, complete with time of communication, red and blue fonts to denote the different speakers and an option for photos to be incorporated.
Lillie says TransTalk will be taken to Fort Bliss later this month for inclusion in the next round of the Army’s trial runs for its new data network. It won’t ever show up in a civilian Android Market, but because of its utility for “force protection, basic First Aid, basic interrogations and checkpoint” operations, Raytheon has other customers.
“It’s been funded by another government agency to improve the Dari model,” Lillie says. Spies need a translator, too, after all.
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