CAMBRIDGE, Mass., March 24 (UPI) -- The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded additional funding to BBN Technologies to continue development of translation technologies.
Massachusetts-based BBN was awarded the DARPA funding to continue support for the Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use, or Transtac, program. Under the approximately $2.79 million deal, BBN will continue working to enhance the capabilities of the Transtac program.
The Transtac program is part of a Defense Department effort to provide soldiers in the field with two-way translation technologies for real-world and tactical situations.
BBN, which under a previous award integrated its TransTalk system into the Transtac program, said it would utilize the new funding to make improvements in "machine translation, speech recognition, text-to-speech synthesis, and the system architecture," according to a news release.
"By breaking the language barrier to spoken communications, BBN TransTalk enables timely conversational exchanges that can save lives in difficult environments," Prem Natarajan, BBN Technologies vice president, said in a statement.
