In mid-October, IBM Corp. shipped to U.S. forces in Iraq the first 35 units of a new product that turns spoken Arabic to spoken English, and English to Arabic, back and forth, on the fly. First testers are medical staffers who must communicate with Iraqi patients.

"What's new is the translation from one spoken language to another," says Manny Athavale, principal, technology collaboration solutions at IBM. "Spoken is very different from text," he says.

The tool, named MASTOR, is installed on Panasonic Toughbooks with dedicated speakers and microphones. Athavale says the goal is to make a product that can run on a handheld PC. And while Iraqi Arabic is first, Mandarin Chinese is next, most likely followed by "widely spread" languages such as German, French and Spanish. "Mexican Spanish will be easier, Athavale says.

"The thing that is hardest is getting a team that speaks it with the right accent so you can record it and build it into the language model." The project is developed with funding from the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency.

IBM has been working on translation technology for a decade, but interest in the project began to heat up in 2000, Athavale says. In 2002 through 2005 the project received annual research support of $1 million from the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency's TRANSTAC program, which also involves several other companies and universities working on automated translation technology. In 2003, DARPA asked IBM to redirect its focus from developing a Mandarin/English translator, to one that could do Iraqi Arabic, instead, Athavale says.

Athavale says once a basic language understanding and translation algorithm has been developed, different "language pairs," such as Mandarin/English, or Arabic/English can be built on top of it fairly quickly. "We have a methodology to add new languages within a short time," he says, adding that Mexican Spanish, for instance, could be developed in about six months, once MASTOR has passed its field trial.

The prototypes are being supplied to the coalition's Joint Forces Command installed on $3,500 laptops built to military specifications and equipped with $1,500 worth of speakers and microphones, so Athavale says the cost of the first batch is not indicative of the eventual cost of a consumer version of the software, which IBM expects to release in the first quarter of 2007.

For the initial JFCOM effort, the total contract value is approximately $300,000 which includes hardware, software, deployment and support services, because the technology is not sold per unit, the company reports. Once the evaluation period is complete, IBM will determine an appropriate pricing structure based on quantities purchased and the technology platform and services required to operate it.

Among the issues IBM is studying in the field trials is the sensitivity of the system to noisy environments, but it sees potential application in call centers and at large scale international events, such as the Olympics.