CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 7 (UPI) -- U.S. defense agency DARPA has awarded additional funding to Raytheon BBN Technologies to continue work on an automatic translation system.
Raytheon said the funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was under the agency's Multilingual Automatic Document Classification, Analysis and Translation program.
Raytheon BBN has met "required milestones" in the first two years of the MADCAT program, it said in a news release Wednesday.
MADCAT aims to create a prototype system to quickly provide "accurate, relevant, distilled, actionable information" to military commands and personnel by converting foreign language text images -- road signs, flyers, photographs and handwritten notes, for example -- into English transcripts automatically without the need for linguists or analysts.
"Foreign language translation on the battlefield is slow, dangerous and expensive," said Prem Natarajan, head of Raytheon BBN's speech and language processing unit. "The MADCAT system will help our troops understand road signs, print media and captured documents that could be of immediate importance to their safety and to the successful completion of their missions."
Raytheon BBN Technologies will further refine a prototype translation system developed under previous awards in this program and which can be installed on laptop computers.
