COTS-Based Multilingual Translator for Military/Industrial Application

The DARPA Phraselator is a, multilingual phrase translation system. The Phraselator is a rugged, weather resistant, voice-to-voice, translation device with superior audio input and output. It is available to both military and industrial users and more than 2,000 Phraselators have been manufactured and delivered. Because of the significant capabilities of this custom device, the cost is relatively high when compared to a COTS Pocket PC such as a HP iPAQ. While the Phraselator software had been successfully demonstrated on the HP iPAQ, this combination is neither rugged nor weather resistant; is not optimized for speech recognition; and is barely audible. However, the cost of a stand-alone PDA running Phraselator software is considerably less. To make DARPA Phraselator technology more readily available to military and commercial markets, the unit cost needs to be significantly reduced without severely impacting overall performance. The MAI/SRI team will develop a low cost multilingual translator that will function in a similar way to the current Phraselator, leverage off of existing Phraselator technology, and use existing databases. This new design will be a low cost, durable, single purpose device optimized for voice-to-voice phrase translation and will incorporate the state of the Phraselator hardware and software technology.