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31-470: The Phraselator is a small speech translation PDA -sized device designed to aid in interpretation . The device does not produce synthesized speech like that utilized by Stephen Hawking ; instead, it plays pre-recorded foreign language MP3 files. Users can select the phrase they wish to convey from an English list on the screen or speak into the device. It then uses speech recognition technology called DynaSpeak, developed by SRI International , to play

62-447: A string of words , using dictionary and grammar of language A, based on a massive corpus of text in language A. The machine translation module then translates this string. Early systems replaced every word with a corresponding word in language B. Current systems do not use word-for-word translation, but rather take into account the entire context of the input to generate the appropriate translation. The generated translation utterance

93-690: A vocabulary of 40,000 English words and 50,000 words in Iraqi Arabic . The handheld translator was recently used by U.S. troops while providing relief to tsunami victims in early 2005. About 500 prototypes of the device were provided to U.S. military forces in Operation Enduring Freedom . Units loaded with Haitian dialects have been provided to U.S. troops in Haiti . Army military police have used it in Kandahar to communicate with POWs . In late 2004,

124-506: Is Iraq's de facto national vernacular, as about half of the population speaks it as a mother tongue, and most other Iraqis understand it. It is spreading to northern cities as well. Other Arabic speakers cannot easily understand Moslawi and Baghdadi. Mesopotamian Arabic, especially Qeltu , has a significant Eastern Aramaic substrate , and through it also has significant influences from ancient Mesopotamian languages of Sumerian and Akkadian . Eastern Aramaic dialects flourished and became

155-675: Is being used to communicate. A popular application is Jibbigo that works offline. Currently, speech translation technology is available as product that instantly translates free form multi-lingual conversations. These systems instantly translate continuous speech. Challenges in accomplishing this include overcoming speaker-dependent variations in style of speaking or pronunciation are issues that have to be dealt with in order to provide high-quality translation for all users. Moreover, speech recognition systems must be able to remedy external factors such as acoustic noise or speech by other speakers in real-world use of speech translation systems. For

186-502: Is more flexible." Iraqi Arabic Mesopotamian Arabic ( Arabic : لهجة بلاد ما بين النهرين ), also known as Iraqi Arabic ( Arabic : اللهجة العراقية ), or just as Iraqi ( Arabic : عراقي ), is a group of varieties of Arabic spoken in the Mesopotamian basin of Iraq , as well as in Syria , southeastern Turkey , Iran , Kuwait and Iraqi diaspora communities. Aramaic was

217-477: Is sent to the speech synthesis module, which estimates the pronunciation and intonation matching the string of words based on a corpus of speech data in language B. Waveforms matching the text are selected from this database and the speech synthesis connects and outputs them. In 1983, NEC Corporation demonstrated speech translation as a concept exhibit at the ITU Telecom World (Telecom '83). In 1999,

248-539: Is the process by which conversational spoken phrases are instantly translated and spoken aloud in a second language. This differs from phrase translation , which is where the system only translates a fixed and finite set of phrases that have been manually entered into the system. Speech translation technology enables speakers of different languages to communicate. It thus is of tremendous value for humankind in terms of science, cross-cultural exchange and global business. A speech translation system would typically integrate

279-776: The Ponca , and the Comanche Nation have also used the device to preserve their dying languages . Various law enforcement agencies, such as the Los Angeles Police Department , also use the phraselator in their patrol cars. In March 2004, DARPA director Dr. Tony Tether presented the Small Business Innovative Research Award to the VoxTec division of Marine Acoustics at DARPATech 2004 in Anaheim, CA . The device

310-553: The estimated 6,000 languages said to exist on our planet today. As the collection of corpora is extremely expensive, collecting data from the Web would be an alternative to conventional methods. "Secondary use of news or other media published in multiple languages would be an effective way to improve performance of speech translation." However, "current copyright law does not take secondary uses such as these types of corpora into account" and thus "it will be necessary to revise it so that it

341-516: The lingua franca in Mesopotamia from the early 1st millennium BCE until the late 1st millennium CE, and as may be expected, Mesopotamian Arabic shows signs of an Aramaic substrate . The Gelet and the Judeo-Iraqi varieties have retained features of Babylonian Aramaic . Mesopotamian Arabic has two major varieties: Gelet Mesopotamian Arabic and Qeltu Mesopotamian Arabic . Their names derive from

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372-578: The 1940s–1950s . Geographically, the gelet–qeltu classification roughly corresponds to respectively Upper Mesopotamia and Lower Mesopotamia . The isogloss is between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates , around Fallujah and Samarra . During the Siege of Baghdad (1258), the Mongols killed all Muslims. However, sedentary Christians and Jews were spared and northern Iraq was untouched. In southern Iraq, sedentary Muslims were gradually replaced by Bedouins from

403-595: The Asia-Pacific region). They were founded as "international joint-research organization[s] to design formats of bilingual corpora that are essential to advance the research and development of this technology ... and to standardize interfaces and data formats to connect speech translation module internationally". Today, speech translation systems are being used throughout the world. Examples include medical facilities, schools, police, hotels, retail stores, and factories. These systems are applicable anywhere that spoken language

434-466: The C-Star-2 consortium demonstrated speech-to-speech translation of 5 languages including English, Japanese, Italian, Korean, and German. Apart from the problems involved in the text translation, it also has to deal with special problems occur in speech-to-speech translation, incorporating incoherence of spoken language, fewer grammar constraints of spoken language, unclear word boundary of spoken language,

465-553: The P2, was released in 2004 and developed according to feedback from U.S. soldiers. It translates one way from English to approximately 60 other languages. It has a directional microphone, a larger library of phrases and a longer battery life. The 2004 release was created by and utilizes a computer board manufactured by InHand Electronics, Inc. In the future, the device will be able to display pictures so users can ask questions such as "Have you seen this person?" Developer Ace Sarich notes that

496-495: The Phraselator would not be recommended. This device, at least in the form tested, would best be used in large-scale operations where there is no time for language training and there is a need to communicate fixed ideas, quickly, over the greatest distance by employing large amounts of unskilled users. Large humanitarian or natural disasters in remote areas of third-world countries might be an effective example. The original idea for

527-521: The U.S. Navy began to augment some ships with a version of the device attached to large speakers in order to broadcast clear voice instructions up to 400 yards (370 m) away. Corrections officers and law enforcement in Oneida County, New York , have tested the device. Hospital emergency rooms and health departments have also evaluated it. Several Native American tribes such as the Choctaw Nation ,

558-435: The correction of speech recognition errors and multiple optional inputs. Additionally, speech-to-speech translation also has its advantages compared with text translation, including less complex structure of spoken language and less vocabulary in spoken language. Research and development has gradually progressed from relatively simple to more advanced translation. International evaluation workshops were established to support

589-560: The countryside. This explains the current dialect distribution: in the south, everyone speaks Bedouin varieties close to Gulf Arabic (continuation of the Bedouin dialects of the Arabian Peninsula ), except urban Non-Muslims who continue to speak pre-1258 qeltu dialects while in the north the original qeltu dialect is still spoken by all, Muslims and Non-Muslims alike. Gelet dialects include: Qeltu dialects include: Baghdadi Arabic

620-569: The development of speech-translation technology. They allow research institutes to cooperate and compete against each other at the same time. The concept of those workshop is a kind of contest: a common dataset is provided by the organizers and the participating research institutes create systems that are evaluated. In this way, efficient research is being promoted. The I nternational Workshop on Spoken Language Translation ( IWSLT ), organized by C-STAR, an international consortium for research on speech translation, has been held since 2004. "Every year,

651-464: The device came from Lee Morin, a Navy doctor in Operation Desert Storm . To communicate with patients, he played Arabic audio files from his laptop. He informed Ace Sarich, the vice president of VoxTec, about the idea. VoxTec won a DARPA Small Business Innovation Research grant in early 2001 to develop a military-grade handheld phrase translator. During its development, the Phraselator

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682-723: The device could only translate one-way. At the time, the only existing two-way voice translator that could convert speech back and forth between languages was the Audio Voice Translation Guide System, or TONGUES, which was developed by Carnegie Mellon University for Lockheed Martin. As part of a DARPA program known as the Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use, SRI International has further developed two-way translation software for use in Iraq called IraqComm in 2006 which contains

713-436: The device is inferior to human interpreter . Conclusions derived from a Nepal field test conducted by U.S. and Nepal based NGO Himalayan Aid in 2004 seemed to confirm Sarich's comparisons: The very concept of using a machine as a communication point between individuals seemed to actually encourage a more limited form of interaction between tester and respondent. Usually, when limited language skills are present between parties,

744-404: The following three software technologies: automatic speech recognition (ASR), machine translation (MT) and voice synthesis (TTS). The speaker of language A speaks into a microphone and the speech recognition module recognizes the utterance. It compares the input with a phonological model, consisting of a large corpus of speech data from multiple speakers. The input is then converted into

775-493: The form of the word for "I said" in each variety. Gelet Arabic is a Bedouin variety spoken by Muslims (both sedentary and non-sedentary) in central and southern Iraq and by nomads in the rest of Iraq. Qeltu Arabic is an urban dialect spoken by Non-Muslims of central and southern Iraq (including Baghdad) and by the sedentary population (both Muslims and Non-Muslims) of the rest of the country. Non-Muslims include Christians , Yazidis , and Jews , until most Iraqi Jews left Iraq in

806-441: The genuine struggle and desire to communicate acts as a display of good will – we openly display our weakness in this regard – and the result is a more relaxed and human encounter. This was not necessarily present with the Phraselator as all parties abandoned learning about each other and instead focused on learning how to work with the device. As a tool for bridging any cultural differences or communicating effectively at any length,

837-530: The number of participating institutes increases, and it has become a key event for speech translation research." When many countries begin to research and develop speech translation, it will be necessary to standardize interfaces and data formats to ensure that the systems are mutually compatible. International joint research is being fostered by speech translation consortiums (e.g. the C-STAR international consortium for joint research of speech translation and A-STAR for

868-664: The proper sound file. The accuracy of the speech recognition software is over 70 percent according to software developer Jack Buchanan. The device can also record replies for translation later. Pre-recorded phrases are stored on Secure Digital flash memory cards. A 128 MB card can hold up to 12,000 phrases in four or five languages. Users can download phrase modules from the official website, which contained over 300,000 phrases as of March 2005. Users can also construct their own custom phrase modules. Earlier devices were known to have run on an SA-1110 Strong Arm 206 MHz CPU with 32MB SDRAM and 32MB onboard Flash RAM. A newer model,

899-443: The reason that the user does not understand the target language when speech translation is used, a method "must be provided for the user to check whether the translation is correct, by such means as translating it again back into the user's language". In order to achieve the goal of erasing the language barrier worldwide, multiple languages have to be supported. This requires speech corpora, bilingual corpora and text corpora for each of

930-579: Was recently listed as one of " Ten Emerging Technologies That Will Change Your World " in MIT's Technology Review . Software developer Jack Buchanan believes that building a device similar to the fictional universal translator seen in Star Trek would be harder than building the Enterprise . The device was mentioned in a list of "Top 10 Star Trek Tech" on Space.com . Speech translation Speech translation

961-524: Was tested and evaluated by scientists from the Army Research Laboratory . The device was first field tested in Afghanistan in 2001. By 2002, about 500 Phraselators were built for soldiers around the world with another 250 ordered by the U.S. Special Forces. The device cost $ 2000 to develop and could convert spoken English into one of 200,000 recorded commands and questions in 30 languages. However,

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