But the donation – which IBM officially announced as a “humanitarian donation” – is so strange it is not yet clear whether the military is allowed to accept it.
Government lawyers are studying the offer to see whether it would be legal to accept it. The offer was made directly by IBM’s top officer, chairman and chief executive Sam Palmisano, to US President George W. Bush.
The donation of 1,000 two-way, automatic translation devices and 10,0000 copies of the software for future use, is intended by IBM to “help augment human translators” to improve the safety of US and coalition troops.
“IBM employees returning from service with the US military in Iraq have consistently emphasized two points: the importance of communicating with the Iraqi people and the operational challenges posed by the need to do so,” Mr Palmisano said.
“Although in many instances human translators are essential, we also believe that there are technological solutions to help mitigate the problem.” he said.
The IBM systems are advanced, two-way "speech-to-speech" translators – code-named MASTOR (for Multilingual Automatic Speech Translator) – that improve communication between English and Iraqi Arabic speakers.
Development of MASTOR technology began in 2001 at IBM's TJ Watson Research Centre and gained development support as part of the spooky Defense Advanced Research Project Agency’s (DARPA’s) Spoken Language Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use (TRANSTAC) program.
The technology is said to let users to converse naturally, producing audible and text translations of the spoken words. It can run on a variety of devices, like PDAs, tablet PC or notebook computers.
But there are hurdles yet to jump. Reports in the US quote a spokesman for US vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying the donation is greatly appreciated was “under evaluation right now”, but that did “not constitute acceptance.
The issue is IBM’s existing business with the military. The company is a huge defence contractor, selling about US$3 billion worth of goods and services into the military annually.
The issue muddied by the fact that MASTOR technology being donated by IBM is currently undergoing testing – along with rival technology – by the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command.
A podcast conversation with IBM researcher and chief translation technologist David Nahamoo regarding the donation and the future of translation can be found here.
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