Ruggedization of the USJFCOM Transformation Laboratory -or- Yes, MASTOR!

DARPA has been working with IBM to create a "ruggedized" laptop with the Multilingual Automatic Speech-to-Speech Translator system, a.k.a. MASTOR, "to translate natural speech in real-time to make up for a lack of military linguists proficient in Iraqi Arabic." (I seem to remember reading that their busload of freshly-trained Arabic linguists was blown up on delivery. This must be Plan B.) One just can't help but wonder, how well this is going to work, just from looking at all the military jargon in the press release -- and that's in printed English, presumably written by a professional writer, not translation from input derived from speech recognition of a stream of obscenities uttered by an undereducated grunt noble American warrior in a noisy environment. When you need it the most, in a firefight, or when explosions are going off, flames are crackling, babies crying, women wailing, it probably wouldn't function much better than a Bowlingual with low batteries. To be fair, they admit that is is designed for use in "benign environments" such as hospitals and "secure areas", a constantly shrinking topological construct, hard to find in neo-mesopotamia, until we train them to build karaoke boxes.

When used in Iraq, Mastor will act as an automated bi-directional, English-to-Iraqi Arabic translator capable of translating more than 50,000 English words and 100,000 Iraqi Arabic words.

Uh-huh, right. Tractors are flowering as the nuclear explosion in a binding stores beans. Insert this substance into your hookah and proceed to inhale the fumes thereof. My hovercraft is full of eels. And get this: It's a Panasonic Toughbook. You gotta like the sound of that. Now we're gonna win the war for sure! War is over, if you want it. OK, maybe I am overreacting to the silly name. Too bad it isn't a wind-up like Moammar's. Where are you going to charge it in Iraq?

The only good thing I see about the feature set is that it is going to include a back-translation, so the speaker may often be able to see how garbled his or her words became in the round trip. Within a few generations (of users), they might learn to speak clearly in short simple sentences using a few hundred key words, which, after all, they could have learned in a few weeks. Carry on, invisible insanity! You will extend an appendage to the earth of assurances.

I know it is intended to reduce the need to shoot civilians, by enabling a machine-language interface for speech-to-speech communication, but I wonder if there aren't some people who would prefer to be shot. But what do I know? This just might be the killer app that causes lions to lie down with leg of lamb or whatever the saying is.