Speaking the Language
Warfighters Listen for Translation Support.
by Michael Burnett, SOTECH Correspondent
The Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), in the third of five years, has met its objectives to date with flying colors. The program is on track to provide extremely high accuracy in translation for several genres of print and broadcast programming, eliminating the need for linguists for situations where U.S. warfighters would like to understand standardized Arabic, Dr. Joseph Olive, GALE’s program manager, told Special Operations Technology.
GALE has been developing a box that translates both news wire and broadcast news—both considered well-structured mediums for text and speech respectively. When GALE first started, DARPA ran a test to see where its baseline capabilities were for both in Arabic and Chinese.
“For Arabic in those, we had a 45 percent error in text and a 65 percent error in speech. For Chinese, which is much more difficult, we had 65 percent error in text and about 80 percent error in speech. You were basically getting some of the words but you weren’t getting everything,” Olive reported.
DARPA decided early that GALE shouldn’t necessarily be able to translate incredibly sophisticated documents, and so it set out to achieve a certain accuracy for a certain percentage of documents. In the first phase, DARPA and its contractors set out to hit a target of 75 percent accuracy for 90 percent of the documents on Arabic news wires. They achieved that goal and moved on to achieve the goal of 80 percent accuracy the following year.
“Our ultimate target within the next three years is to go for 95 percent accuracy on 95 percent of the documents,” Olive explained. “We do understand that some documents are just impossible. But we are trying to get that to a minimum level, so that when a soldier wants something translated, he can rely within 95 percent that he is going to get a translation that would require little or no human interaction. He would be able to thoroughly understand the article and get the information out of it.”
In augment information from news wires and broadcast news, DARPA has added Internet blogs and news groups and television talk shows to its translation offerings, at the request of U.S. military partners. Those genres pose greater challenges in translation as their language is not as well structured. They could both contain colloquialisms or poor grammar or use different dialects, posing a challenge to translation devices such as GALE.
“All news broadcasts are done in standard Arabic. As soon as you have a guy on the street, you don’t know if he is going to be speaking Iraqi or whatever is his home dialect is. We have to deal with all of that,” Olive said. “The targets there are slightly lower but we are aiming for extremely high targets there as well.”
The accuracy of the GALE devices—under development with contractors BBN Technologies, IBM and SRI International—is verified through the use of multiple linguists, whose work is checked by multiple quality assurance personnel, whose work is examined by an adjudicator.
That process establishes a “gold standard” for a translation device to achieve, Olive described. So DARPA researchers provide foreign-language material to a device for translations. Then, they count how many edits were necessary to the machine translation to make it look like the “gold standard” translation, which yields an error. They divide the error by the number of words in the document to calculate the error rate.
At present, DARPA has deployed three devices in Iraq and a device at the headquarters of U.S. Central Command in Florida. About 14 devices are fielded somewhere in the world in some capacity, Olive estimated.
“We put the first machine in CENTCOM in 2004 after the Iraq War started in 2003,” he recalled. “Until 2004, they were only looking into English sources. Once we put a machine in there, they were able to look at Arabic sources. Even with the translation at 55 percent accuracy, they were able to really discern which articles were important and which ones weren’t. So now looking at 5,000 articles per week, they needed only 300 translated by humans. So that’s approximately a 95 percent savings in manpower.”
TWO-WAY COMMUNICATION
While GALE addresses broadcast or print translations, DARPA also funds projects for two-way speech translation under the Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use (TRANSTAC) program. The goal of TRANSTAC is to eventually produce a handheld device that can translate speech between two foreign speakers, such as an American and an Iraqi, who otherwise would not be able to understand one another.
DARPA has contracted several companies, including Voxtec International Inc. of Annapolis, Md., to help fulfill the goals of TRANSTAC, but that isn’t going to happen quickly, Voxtec President John Hall told SOTECH.
“We know those systems are not ready for prime time; their horizon isn’t for at least another five years, according to DARPA,” Hall commented. “Some of the TRANSTAC investigators have made great strides in having an English/Iraqi two-way translation system. Those are running on some very powerful laptops,” but they are not ready for widespread use, Hall added.
So Voxtec International has been bridging the gap between now and the day two-way communications devices are available with bi-directional, phrase-based devices that provide translation in specific situations. The company’s Phraselator and its newly introduced Squad Integrated Device (SQUID) for special forces have provided the means for warfighters to communicate to foreign nationals in the course of their jobs.
The Phraselator P2 is receiving an upgraded mainboard to optimize its processor, while the lightweight SQUID is getting a lapel microphone to make it even more portable. In addition, Voxtec International has added a counterinsurgency module to both devices to enable Marines and other troops to direct such operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The language modules in the P2 and SQUID provide English speakers with a means to match words or phrases to translated Arabic, Pashto or other languages in specific scenarios.
“You speak English and it matches to concepts or phrases. We are able to have very high accuracy of the translations for those different situations where they are used. They have been very popular because you know you are not getting any errors in machine translation. Those phrases have been designed for force protection, vehicle search, checkpoint, medical emergency, civil affairs, counterinsurgency ops and those types of things,” Hall stated.
With both P2 and SQUID devices, soldiers can create sequences, where they string together phrases so that they can conduct longer procedures such as a vehicle search. When the soldier orders the device to begin a vehicle search sequence, the device directs a foreign national to begin following directions for a procedure. Meanwhile, the device informs the soldier of the sequence of events as well. Should the foreign national fail to comply with a step of the procedure, the soldier can order the device to repeat that last command.
“We also have broadcast messages,” Hall commented. “You can broadcast in one language or multiple languages. The user can define those. They are popular in escalation of force kits. You can attach it to a loudspeaker system. You can tell it to broadcast in all languages for a perimeter security sequence, for example. It can have a series of phrases or messages that you want to have broadcasted in all the languages on the device or any specific language.”
In 2008, Voxtec International will introduce the Phraselator P3, the next generation of the device. It is very similar to the P2, but it has more processing power. The P3 will come with 1-8 GB of memory and be optimized for two-way audio to permit the beginnings of rudimentary two-way communication.
“That is the platform that we are using to develop a limited two-way capability for different language pairs such as English to Iraqi and back and forth, English to Farsi or English to Dari,” Hall said. “We are also working on Hongol and Spanish.”
The P3 will utilize a floating point processor architecture, which offers a lot more computer power for richer automatic speech recognition as well as the incorporation of machine translation and speech synthesis, Hall explained. Those capabilities provide the start of recognizing bi-directional language pairs that would eventually yield two-way communication.
LIMITED TRANSLATION DEVICES
Voxtec isn’t the only company working on the problem of communicating to foreign citizens. Integrated Wave Technologies (IWT) of Fremont, Calif., has developed the Voice Response Translator (VRT), which also recognizes English phrases and translates them to different languages.
“We are able to recognize speech through very high noise and with very high accuracy,” IWT President Tim McCune told SOTECH. “We also have automatic speech detection in this environment. We have the only system that is truly eyes-free, hands-free. That the user doesn’t have to touch it, manipulate it or look at it while using it. You can be at a door with eyes-up and guns-up, and you are issuing commands and the translation is coming out without loss of situational awareness or weapons readiness.”
The VRT, optimized for combat situations, translates roughly 350 phrases for use in difficult situations. IWT has fielded about 5,000 systems to date for use by U.S. forces in the Middle East.
“We want to build systems that enable the fire team or squad level guy to be out doing things from house searches, traffic control points, or landing zones without taking his eyes or hands off what he is doing. We are always going to be building very tiny systems that do things that don’t compromise the soldier doing what he is supposed to be doing,” McCune said.
“But further down the road, we want to be able to understand a little bit of stuff coming back. Most of the time, a soldier in those situations want to tell people who he is, what he is doing, and what he wants them to do. So he’s not looking for a big conversational encounter,” McCune continued.
So the new capabilities would provide some ability for U.S. soldiers to understand Arabic speakers as they direct them to a weapons cache or a vehicle. Soldiers looking for enemy assets could quiz bystanders using the VRT.
“The VRT, still eyes-free, hands-free, would understand the rudimentary parts of the response. It would pick up that a vehicle was a black car, that it was a four-door, or that it had a broken window,” McCune said.
IWT also will soon introduce the headset integrated translator, which is inspired by work special operators conducted with the VRT. The 3rd Ranger Battalion and SEAL Team 1 both fielded the VRT recently, and IWT integrated the device into their modular integrated communication headset systems. That work inspired IWT to propose to DARPA that the company create a prepackaged headset translator with the VRT’s one-way communications capability along with a limited talkback capability.
DARPA funded the project, which will result in a very powerful translation system in a headset with small speakers mounted on the outside of the earmuffs, McCune described. Special operators could speak into the headset, the headset would translate the phrase into the foreign language, and the foreign phrase would go through the speakers.
When a foreign speaker replies, microphones in the headset pick up keywords in the reply and translate them through the earmuffs and into the warfighter’s ears. Both speakers and microphones are invisible to casual observation.
The devices have definitely shown their worth, McCune said, and many prefer the use of translation devices to human translators.
“I talked to three different Iraqi generals,” McCune said of a recent trip to Iraq. “People say if you have a human translator, you wouldn’t use a machine. But these guys said, no, a lot of times the human translators that are available we wouldn’t want to use.
“If an Iraqi officer is talking to an American officer, he doesn’t want to have a Kurd translating between them for a lot of reasons. One, he finds it socially unacceptable. Two, he thinks it might be a security risk,” he said.
BROADCAST MONITORS
BBN Technologies of Cambridge, Mass., has been serving as a contractor to DARPA on both the GALE and TRANSTAC projects. In the case of GALE, the company has been updating its proprietary Broadcast Monitoring System with research innovations from the program, Prem Natarajan, BBN Technologies’ chief of speech solutions, told SOTECH.
“The system has been the platform through which we have deployed most of the GALE technology because that system uses speech recognition and translation,” Natarajan explained. “Every year, as we perform research on GALE, we have a task where we actually transition the research output into fielded systems on an ongoing basis. The field systems are never more than six to eight months behind the latest research effort for both speech recognition and translation.”
The Broadcast Monitoring System provides its U.S. military users with 24/7 real-time monitoring of foreign-language broadcast news outlets. BBN Technologies has deployed systems inside and outside of the United States to monitor broadcasts in Arabic, Farsi, Chinese and Spanish, and Natarajan said the company could add any new language required for particular needs.
The Broadcast Monitoring System transcribes foreign-language speech from target news outlets into text. It can then identify specific search queries in the transcribed text. The system further translates the transcribed text into English and highlights any queries there as well.
The system provides a real-time streaming display to its users through a Web browser, which also displays the transcription and translation of the video content. The system can identify different speakers as they appear on programs, creating a model of the speaker’s speech on the fly and storing it so that it can automatically identify the same speaker again in the future.
Analysts can use a feature of the Broadcast Monitoring System called the translator’s aide to export video or still images from a broadcast or a “rich multimedia package that includes a video segment of interest along with the transcription output, the speaker information and all of that,” Natarajan emphasized.
“It exports the transcription and the translation into English and the speaker information markup and all of that into a selfcontained package. The package also contains an editing tool that is browser based. So analysts can open up that package, and they will see the video and the transcription and translation and it gives them a third panel where they can add their own annotations to it,” he added.
Analysts can send their annotated segments to others, who could open up the self-contained package without any special software.
Users can also use a feature known as watchlist alerting to set the Broadcast Monitoring System to catch specific phrases or combinations of phrases on regularly established searches. Individual users login into the Broadcast Monitoring System through Web browsers into their individual accounts, which can hold a set of watchlists to monitor broadcasts for specific material. Each time a user logs in, the system will alert him or her to the new material found matching the watchlist searches. The system currently holds a 90-day archive, but BBN Technologies is upgrading it to a one-year archive for some of its customers.
HUMAN TOUCH
Despite advances in technology, U.S. warfighters must still depend on linguists for translations in many key operations. TCS Translations LLC, based in McLean, Va., provides translators in Iraq as a subcontractor to L-3 Communications. The company, long known for providing linguistic training support to troops in the United States, fielded translators in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, Brian Lawson, TCS Translations vice president of business development, told SOTECH.
“Aside from the roleplayer support we provide in the United States, we also are currently providing linguistic support to all of the DoD elements in OIF. We were previously supporting OEF as well. We have about 55-60 cleared linguists with secret or higher clearance supporting U.S. forces on the ground in Iraq at any given time,” Lawson commented.
“It is an important piece of the operations on the ground there. A lot of these guys cannot fully operate without the linguists because of the language barriers and the culture barriers. It’s been noted numerous times that U.S. soldiers wouldn’t be able to get the job done without them,” Lawson added.
The translators assist U.S. warfighters with a variety of languages, but these days they usually concentrate on Arabic dialects, mostly Iraqi Arabic.
The company screens and vets all translators before hiring them and deploying them with U.S. troops. They also provide them with language testing to ensure their proficiency and ensure they have undergone medical screening.
Lawson pointed out that the company tries to give the same sort of support to its deploying linguists that they military might provide to deploying warfighters.
“We have developed a program here in-house called TCS Cares,” Lawson said. “This program was modeled after the U.S. military’s Family Support Program. This program was established to support the family members of our linguists on the ground in theater. During those times of crisis or during personal emergencies, they can reach out to us at any time and we will do whatever we can to help them out, depending upon the situation. We are constantly working with the people on the ground as well as their families to make sure we meet those needs, whatever they may be.”
Roleplaying support for stateside training also remains in high demand, said Miguel Tuason, TCS Translations director of proposals and business development.
“In terms of language services, we try to be current in terms of the materials and technologies we use,” Tuason said. “For the military over the past seven years, the focus has been on training deploying troops—in culture, language and what they should expect when they get to their destinations. We have been a player in developing those programs.” ♦
GALE has been developing a box that translates both news wire and broadcast news—both considered well-structured mediums for text and speech respectively. When GALE first started, DARPA ran a test to see where its baseline capabilities were for both in Arabic and Chinese.
“For Arabic in those, we had a 45 percent error in text and a 65 percent error in speech. For Chinese, which is much more difficult, we had 65 percent error in text and about 80 percent error in speech. You were basically getting some of the words but you weren’t getting everything,” Olive reported.
DARPA decided early that GALE shouldn’t necessarily be able to translate incredibly sophisticated documents, and so it set out to achieve a certain accuracy for a certain percentage of documents. In the first phase, DARPA and its contractors set out to hit a target of 75 percent accuracy for 90 percent of the documents on Arabic news wires. They achieved that goal and moved on to achieve the goal of 80 percent accuracy the following year.
“Our ultimate target within the next three years is to go for 95 percent accuracy on 95 percent of the documents,” Olive explained. “We do understand that some documents are just impossible. But we are trying to get that to a minimum level, so that when a soldier wants something translated, he can rely within 95 percent that he is going to get a translation that would require little or no human interaction. He would be able to thoroughly understand the article and get the information out of it.”
In augment information from news wires and broadcast news, DARPA has added Internet blogs and news groups and television talk shows to its translation offerings, at the request of U.S. military partners. Those genres pose greater challenges in translation as their language is not as well structured. They could both contain colloquialisms or poor grammar or use different dialects, posing a challenge to translation devices such as GALE.
“All news broadcasts are done in standard Arabic. As soon as you have a guy on the street, you don’t know if he is going to be speaking Iraqi or whatever is his home dialect is. We have to deal with all of that,” Olive said. “The targets there are slightly lower but we are aiming for extremely high targets there as well.”
The accuracy of the GALE devices—under development with contractors BBN Technologies, IBM and SRI International—is verified through the use of multiple linguists, whose work is checked by multiple quality assurance personnel, whose work is examined by an adjudicator.
That process establishes a “gold standard” for a translation device to achieve, Olive described. So DARPA researchers provide foreign-language material to a device for translations. Then, they count how many edits were necessary to the machine translation to make it look like the “gold standard” translation, which yields an error. They divide the error by the number of words in the document to calculate the error rate.
At present, DARPA has deployed three devices in Iraq and a device at the headquarters of U.S. Central Command in Florida. About 14 devices are fielded somewhere in the world in some capacity, Olive estimated.
“We put the first machine in CENTCOM in 2004 after the Iraq War started in 2003,” he recalled. “Until 2004, they were only looking into English sources. Once we put a machine in there, they were able to look at Arabic sources. Even with the translation at 55 percent accuracy, they were able to really discern which articles were important and which ones weren’t. So now looking at 5,000 articles per week, they needed only 300 translated by humans. So that’s approximately a 95 percent savings in manpower.”
TWO-WAY COMMUNICATION
While GALE addresses broadcast or print translations, DARPA also funds projects for two-way speech translation under the Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use (TRANSTAC) program. The goal of TRANSTAC is to eventually produce a handheld device that can translate speech between two foreign speakers, such as an American and an Iraqi, who otherwise would not be able to understand one another.
DARPA has contracted several companies, including Voxtec International Inc. of Annapolis, Md., to help fulfill the goals of TRANSTAC, but that isn’t going to happen quickly, Voxtec President John Hall told SOTECH.
“We know those systems are not ready for prime time; their horizon isn’t for at least another five years, according to DARPA,” Hall commented. “Some of the TRANSTAC investigators have made great strides in having an English/Iraqi two-way translation system. Those are running on some very powerful laptops,” but they are not ready for widespread use, Hall added.
So Voxtec International has been bridging the gap between now and the day two-way communications devices are available with bi-directional, phrase-based devices that provide translation in specific situations. The company’s Phraselator and its newly introduced Squad Integrated Device (SQUID) for special forces have provided the means for warfighters to communicate to foreign nationals in the course of their jobs.
The Phraselator P2 is receiving an upgraded mainboard to optimize its processor, while the lightweight SQUID is getting a lapel microphone to make it even more portable. In addition, Voxtec International has added a counterinsurgency module to both devices to enable Marines and other troops to direct such operations in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The language modules in the P2 and SQUID provide English speakers with a means to match words or phrases to translated Arabic, Pashto or other languages in specific scenarios.
“You speak English and it matches to concepts or phrases. We are able to have very high accuracy of the translations for those different situations where they are used. They have been very popular because you know you are not getting any errors in machine translation. Those phrases have been designed for force protection, vehicle search, checkpoint, medical emergency, civil affairs, counterinsurgency ops and those types of things,” Hall stated.
With both P2 and SQUID devices, soldiers can create sequences, where they string together phrases so that they can conduct longer procedures such as a vehicle search. When the soldier orders the device to begin a vehicle search sequence, the device directs a foreign national to begin following directions for a procedure. Meanwhile, the device informs the soldier of the sequence of events as well. Should the foreign national fail to comply with a step of the procedure, the soldier can order the device to repeat that last command.
“We also have broadcast messages,” Hall commented. “You can broadcast in one language or multiple languages. The user can define those. They are popular in escalation of force kits. You can attach it to a loudspeaker system. You can tell it to broadcast in all languages for a perimeter security sequence, for example. It can have a series of phrases or messages that you want to have broadcasted in all the languages on the device or any specific language.”
In 2008, Voxtec International will introduce the Phraselator P3, the next generation of the device. It is very similar to the P2, but it has more processing power. The P3 will come with 1-8 GB of memory and be optimized for two-way audio to permit the beginnings of rudimentary two-way communication.
“That is the platform that we are using to develop a limited two-way capability for different language pairs such as English to Iraqi and back and forth, English to Farsi or English to Dari,” Hall said. “We are also working on Hongol and Spanish.”
The P3 will utilize a floating point processor architecture, which offers a lot more computer power for richer automatic speech recognition as well as the incorporation of machine translation and speech synthesis, Hall explained. Those capabilities provide the start of recognizing bi-directional language pairs that would eventually yield two-way communication.
LIMITED TRANSLATION DEVICES
Voxtec isn’t the only company working on the problem of communicating to foreign citizens. Integrated Wave Technologies (IWT) of Fremont, Calif., has developed the Voice Response Translator (VRT), which also recognizes English phrases and translates them to different languages.
“We are able to recognize speech through very high noise and with very high accuracy,” IWT President Tim McCune told SOTECH. “We also have automatic speech detection in this environment. We have the only system that is truly eyes-free, hands-free. That the user doesn’t have to touch it, manipulate it or look at it while using it. You can be at a door with eyes-up and guns-up, and you are issuing commands and the translation is coming out without loss of situational awareness or weapons readiness.”
The VRT, optimized for combat situations, translates roughly 350 phrases for use in difficult situations. IWT has fielded about 5,000 systems to date for use by U.S. forces in the Middle East.
“We want to build systems that enable the fire team or squad level guy to be out doing things from house searches, traffic control points, or landing zones without taking his eyes or hands off what he is doing. We are always going to be building very tiny systems that do things that don’t compromise the soldier doing what he is supposed to be doing,” McCune said.
“But further down the road, we want to be able to understand a little bit of stuff coming back. Most of the time, a soldier in those situations want to tell people who he is, what he is doing, and what he wants them to do. So he’s not looking for a big conversational encounter,” McCune continued.
So the new capabilities would provide some ability for U.S. soldiers to understand Arabic speakers as they direct them to a weapons cache or a vehicle. Soldiers looking for enemy assets could quiz bystanders using the VRT.
“The VRT, still eyes-free, hands-free, would understand the rudimentary parts of the response. It would pick up that a vehicle was a black car, that it was a four-door, or that it had a broken window,” McCune said.
IWT also will soon introduce the headset integrated translator, which is inspired by work special operators conducted with the VRT. The 3rd Ranger Battalion and SEAL Team 1 both fielded the VRT recently, and IWT integrated the device into their modular integrated communication headset systems. That work inspired IWT to propose to DARPA that the company create a prepackaged headset translator with the VRT’s one-way communications capability along with a limited talkback capability.
DARPA funded the project, which will result in a very powerful translation system in a headset with small speakers mounted on the outside of the earmuffs, McCune described. Special operators could speak into the headset, the headset would translate the phrase into the foreign language, and the foreign phrase would go through the speakers.
When a foreign speaker replies, microphones in the headset pick up keywords in the reply and translate them through the earmuffs and into the warfighter’s ears. Both speakers and microphones are invisible to casual observation.
The devices have definitely shown their worth, McCune said, and many prefer the use of translation devices to human translators.
“I talked to three different Iraqi generals,” McCune said of a recent trip to Iraq. “People say if you have a human translator, you wouldn’t use a machine. But these guys said, no, a lot of times the human translators that are available we wouldn’t want to use.
“If an Iraqi officer is talking to an American officer, he doesn’t want to have a Kurd translating between them for a lot of reasons. One, he finds it socially unacceptable. Two, he thinks it might be a security risk,” he said.
BROADCAST MONITORS
BBN Technologies of Cambridge, Mass., has been serving as a contractor to DARPA on both the GALE and TRANSTAC projects. In the case of GALE, the company has been updating its proprietary Broadcast Monitoring System with research innovations from the program, Prem Natarajan, BBN Technologies’ chief of speech solutions, told SOTECH.
“The system has been the platform through which we have deployed most of the GALE technology because that system uses speech recognition and translation,” Natarajan explained. “Every year, as we perform research on GALE, we have a task where we actually transition the research output into fielded systems on an ongoing basis. The field systems are never more than six to eight months behind the latest research effort for both speech recognition and translation.”
The Broadcast Monitoring System provides its U.S. military users with 24/7 real-time monitoring of foreign-language broadcast news outlets. BBN Technologies has deployed systems inside and outside of the United States to monitor broadcasts in Arabic, Farsi, Chinese and Spanish, and Natarajan said the company could add any new language required for particular needs.
The Broadcast Monitoring System transcribes foreign-language speech from target news outlets into text. It can then identify specific search queries in the transcribed text. The system further translates the transcribed text into English and highlights any queries there as well.
The system provides a real-time streaming display to its users through a Web browser, which also displays the transcription and translation of the video content. The system can identify different speakers as they appear on programs, creating a model of the speaker’s speech on the fly and storing it so that it can automatically identify the same speaker again in the future.
Analysts can use a feature of the Broadcast Monitoring System called the translator’s aide to export video or still images from a broadcast or a “rich multimedia package that includes a video segment of interest along with the transcription output, the speaker information and all of that,” Natarajan emphasized.
“It exports the transcription and the translation into English and the speaker information markup and all of that into a selfcontained package. The package also contains an editing tool that is browser based. So analysts can open up that package, and they will see the video and the transcription and translation and it gives them a third panel where they can add their own annotations to it,” he added.
Analysts can send their annotated segments to others, who could open up the self-contained package without any special software.
Users can also use a feature known as watchlist alerting to set the Broadcast Monitoring System to catch specific phrases or combinations of phrases on regularly established searches. Individual users login into the Broadcast Monitoring System through Web browsers into their individual accounts, which can hold a set of watchlists to monitor broadcasts for specific material. Each time a user logs in, the system will alert him or her to the new material found matching the watchlist searches. The system currently holds a 90-day archive, but BBN Technologies is upgrading it to a one-year archive for some of its customers.
HUMAN TOUCH
Despite advances in technology, U.S. warfighters must still depend on linguists for translations in many key operations. TCS Translations LLC, based in McLean, Va., provides translators in Iraq as a subcontractor to L-3 Communications. The company, long known for providing linguistic training support to troops in the United States, fielded translators in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, Brian Lawson, TCS Translations vice president of business development, told SOTECH.
“Aside from the roleplayer support we provide in the United States, we also are currently providing linguistic support to all of the DoD elements in OIF. We were previously supporting OEF as well. We have about 55-60 cleared linguists with secret or higher clearance supporting U.S. forces on the ground in Iraq at any given time,” Lawson commented.
“It is an important piece of the operations on the ground there. A lot of these guys cannot fully operate without the linguists because of the language barriers and the culture barriers. It’s been noted numerous times that U.S. soldiers wouldn’t be able to get the job done without them,” Lawson added.
The translators assist U.S. warfighters with a variety of languages, but these days they usually concentrate on Arabic dialects, mostly Iraqi Arabic.
The company screens and vets all translators before hiring them and deploying them with U.S. troops. They also provide them with language testing to ensure their proficiency and ensure they have undergone medical screening.
Lawson pointed out that the company tries to give the same sort of support to its deploying linguists that they military might provide to deploying warfighters.
“We have developed a program here in-house called TCS Cares,” Lawson said. “This program was modeled after the U.S. military’s Family Support Program. This program was established to support the family members of our linguists on the ground in theater. During those times of crisis or during personal emergencies, they can reach out to us at any time and we will do whatever we can to help them out, depending upon the situation. We are constantly working with the people on the ground as well as their families to make sure we meet those needs, whatever they may be.”
Roleplaying support for stateside training also remains in high demand, said Miguel Tuason, TCS Translations director of proposals and business development.
“In terms of language services, we try to be current in terms of the materials and technologies we use,” Tuason said. “For the military over the past seven years, the focus has been on training deploying troops—in culture, language and what they should expect when they get to their destinations. We have been a player in developing those programs.” ♦