DARPA authorizes more work on translation device

BBN Technologies has received $2.7 million in additional funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to continue refining a translation system for military personnel to use in tactical situations.

Under the new funding, BBN Technologies, of Cambridge, Mass., will improve the existing system to better serve users in different settings and geographic locations, company officials said March 23. The company will improve machine translation, speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis and system architecture.

The work is being done as part of DARPA’s Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use. The program’s purpose is to field two-way translation systems that allow speakers of different languages to communicate with one another.

In previous work for the program, BBN Technologies incorporated automatic speech recognition and machine translation capabilities into a portable, two-way translation device, officials said. The device, called TransTalk, is designed to work with laptop, tablet and notebook computers.