There’s plenty of foreign language translation software available on the Web, but the Pentagon wants to make it better.
The trick is to teach the translation programs how to recognize slang and informal speech in, say, Arabic and Chinese – the goal of DARPA’s Broad Operational Language Translation (BOLT) program.
It is also developing “natural-language” reading technology, known as Deep Exploration and Filtering of Text (DEFT), so that computers can extract relevant information that is implied in a document but perhaps not stated explicitly.
