Portable Bidirectional Speech Translator for Strategic Languages

Efforts will focus on the physical and logical interface design for a bidirectional translation device. The deliverable will be a prototype design as well as recommendations on ergonomic factors and interaction requirements of a bidirectional speech driven mobile translation appliance. The design of both the physical and logical layout will be drawn from lessons learned from existing devices like the VoxTec Phraselator and commercial mobile devices such as the PalmOne Treo mobile appliance. PNNL has a growing expertise in the development of mobile interfaces from our work on mobile visual analytics (http://nvac.pnl.gov) and fieldable sensors and control devices (http://www.technet.pnl.gov/sensors/). The goal of this project is to build a device which translates in real time spoken utterances in a foreign language to English and vice versa. The needed software modules for this task are three fold: a software, that converts acoustic signals of spoken utterances into text, a software that converts (i.e. translates) from that foreign language to English, and a software that converts the result in English to spoken text. The aimed foreign languages are especially Arabic, including local dialects such as Iraqi or Egyptian Arabic. Also a methodology will be developed to give a possibility to develop the same system for any other Arabic dialect within a very short time.