DARPA News
This is way cool…
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency started a project called GALE (Global Autonomous Language Exploitation) which will translate Chinese and Arabic text and speech into English. The three parts — text to english, speech to english, and a distillation engine — will work together to answer inquiries made by operators. The three current contractors have to meet performance goals starting at 65-75% and finishing at 95% accuracy.
This would have a lot of civilian applications in addition to the main purpose of intelligence gathering.
source:ars