Universal language translations
Universal language translation is becoming a top priority for the Pentagon. The U.S. Department of Defense, by way of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), is seeking $15 million in next year’s budget request to devote to a new project they have entitled BOLT. BOLT stands for the Boundless Operational Language Translation. Its goal is to enable communication through all different mediums and all languages. This is quite the undertaking considering the limited machine translation technology available currently.
Machine translation
Sophisticated machine translation technology has been sought after since the 1950’s, but we are still far from anything reliable in translation quality. Machine translations are often of poor quality, only providing the reader with the gist of the information. All intricacies of the original text or speech are lost.
The most advanced system out currently is Google Translate, which is still quite primitive in comparison to human translation. Considering this, it is surprising that DARPA feels that accurate machine translation is a possibility in the near future. Private companies have been working on machine translation software for years, investing millions of dollars with no successful tools as of yet.
Translation Service Provider
For DARPA to assert that within a year and only investing $15 million that they will develop and possibly perfect this technology, is actually quite absurd. This may, however, provide the translation industry with some valuable insight into bettering machine translation. Until then, the best way to go is to use a reputable translation service provider, who can link you to a qualified, human translator. EPIC Translations has a massive database of translators ready to complete your translation project quickly and without the messy errors of a machine translation.