Star Trek-like 'Phraselator' Helps Police

coondoggie writes "Yet another Star Trek-like device is making its way into the real world. VoxTec's Phraselator name sounds a bit like something the Three Stooges might have used long ago but no, this PDA-like device was developed through Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for use in Afghanistan and Iraq by American soldiers for communicating with locals who spoke Farsi, Dari, Pashto and other languages. It is now being used as one tool to help keep the peace between English and non-English speakers by police departments in California, Florida, Nevada. In a nutshell the $2,500 ruggedized Phraselator runs an Intel PXA255 400mHz processor that supports a built-In noise canceling microphone, a VOCON 3200 Speech Recognizer, 1GB removable SD card, 256MB of DRAM Memory and 64MB Flash Memory. It can store up to 10,000 phrases."

Re:Reminds me of Mars Attacks...

[Megane]

Ruri: "Baka, baaaaka."

Re:Reminds me of Mars Attacks...

[RuBLed]

Funny, it reminds me of an elevator conversation joke in our native tongue (Tagalog).

The scenario is that a foreigner (english) and a native was taking a ride down the elevator and it stopped halfway down, the door opened and the native outside the elevator asked if it is going down. The native inside said Yes it is going down. The conversation goes like this...

Native Outside Elevator: Bababa ba?
Native Inside Elevator: Bababa.
*Both natives understood each other*

The root word is "Baba" meaning "down" or "under".
Doubling the first syllable "Bababa" would mean continuing action as in "going down"
Adding a word "ba" after an action denotes a question (like adding "ka" at the end in Japanese)

So "Bababa ba?" means "Is this going down? (elevator)" to which the answer is an affirmative "Bababa." meaning "Yes it is going down."

"Ba" is pronounced like the "ba" in "bat"

The foreigner then asked if the natives just had a conversation :D

How would this device fare against such scenarios. I dunno. There are so many possibilities when it comes to languages...

Re:I can just imagine it

[ChrisMP1]

The Esperanto for it is wrong.

Mia kusenveturilo estas plena da angiloj

This suggests that your hovercraft is completely made of eels. Try "Mia kusenveturilo estas enspacita de angiloj."

This phrase comes features in a sketch about a badly translated English-Hungarian phrasebook from the British TV comedy show, Monty Python's Flying Circus.

Badly translated English-Esperanto phrasebook anyone?

Re:One Way Tool?

[hughk]

If one looks at the average military procurement program the prime concern is not whether it works, just that there are enough retired senior military officers on the company's payroll. Note that PDAs have been used for some time by people like surveyors, construction workers and so on. These ruggedised versions are best to use for comparison purposes. Yes, they do cost more than a regular PDA, but that much?

But can it handle cultural references?

[MobyDisk]

Darmack and Gillard at Tenagra! Shaka, when the walls fell.

Why translation is hard

[AmiMoJo]

Translating between related languages (such as western European languages which all derive mostly from Latin) is often a case of translating each word and re-arranging the sentence a little. It might sound a bit funny but will convey the meaning. Thus, all the translation software needs is a dictionary and some rules about converting word order in sentences.

Translating between unrelated languages, such as English to Japanese, is much harder. Not only are the words different, but so are all the forms for expressing ideas. In English you might say "John is here", but in Japanese you would effectively say "as for John, here exists." In English you say "John has that book," in Japanese it becomes "at John that (other) book exists." (In Japanese you can say "that book you have" or "that other book", but just generally "that book".) The translation software has to actually understand the meaning of what is being said, in order to re-phrase it in the context of the target language.

In fact, you do get a bit of that even in European languages. For example, in English we say "I am lost," but the French say "I have lost myself."

Re:This is horrid

[TFGeditor]

It also seems a bit overdone for the purpose. Cops investigating an "incident" need very basic information (who, what, when, where, how). When I was in the U.S. Army, we had "pointee-talkee" cards with common questions/answers printed in English and in whatever local language. The questioner pointed to a phrase in English on the card, and the respondent read it in his own language printed immediately beneath. Respondent then pointed to the appropriate response in his language, and the questioner then read it in English.

Very low tech and surprisingly effective, although the shortcomings are obvious.

Still, an electronic translator can introduce problems of its own, as previous posters have pointed out. I remamber back in the 1970s some agency trying to develop a computer translator. They fed it the phrase: "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." The translator computer rendered: "The wine is acceptable but the meat is underdone."