Good translators are hard to find, especially if you are the US military and you need people who speak Arabic. But if new software from IBM proves successful in field trials, it will soon be easier for English-speaking personnel in Iraq to communicate with Iraqis without the need for a human translator.

The United States Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM) has ordered 35 ruggedized laptops equipped with IBM's MASTOR software to test the utility of speech-to-speech machine translation. The software, which has been under development since 2001, provides real-time, two-way translation between English and Arabic without requiring speakers to use preprogrammed phrases.

"Our goal is to enable units operating in areas where human interpreters are scarce to communicate effectively with speakers of different languages in real-world tactical situations," said Wayne Richards of USJFCOM. "The feedback gained in the field is crucial to enhance the translation system requirements and performance expectations."

Here's how it works: soldiers will carry around the new Panasonic ToughBooks. When they want to speak to someone, they open the laptop, load the software, and speak into the microphone. The computer uses ViaVoice technology to recognize words, which it displays on-screen in English. It then translates the phrase into Arabic, displays this as text, and simultaneously uses a text-to-speech engine to say the phrase aloud.

The system has a vocabulary of 50,000 English words and 100,000 Arabic words, though creating an Arabic language model posed a challenge to IBM scientists. They trained the system using 50 hours of recorded speech which contained 200,000 short Arabic phrases. Though researchers acknowledge that the machine translations will not be idiomatic, they are confident that they will prove "good enough" for communicating basic information when a translator is not available.

The MASTOR system is currently available for Iraqi Arabic, Standard Arabic, and Mandarin Chinese. Though the military is currently the main customer, IBM hopes to further commercialize the technology for business use, and they have developed a smaller version that runs on PDAs.