Army taps Raytheon for language translation software

June 26 (UPI) -- Licenses for foreign language translation software are being provided to the U.S. Army for one year by Raytheon BBN Technologies.

The licensing of the software to the U.S. Army's Machine Foreign Language Translation System Program Office is worth $4 million and is the first large scale fielding of the system, Raytheon said in an announcement on Monday.

"Our military needs to converse with foreign language speakers and understand the situation around them," Martha Lillie, Machine Foreign Language Translation System program manager at Raytheon BBN Technologies, said in a press release. "Giving them the tools to converse fluently, exchange information and understand printed material helps them accomplish their missions."

The software is for Pashto, which is spoken in Afghanistan, and Iraqi-Arabic, and provides automatic speech recognition, machine translation, text-to-speech, and optical character recognition.

The Army will use the software on Android-based handheld devices, Windows-equipped laptops and a major intelligence system used at the battalion level.