translation, Software, Defense

BBN Wins $13 Million More for Translation Research

Wade Roush 3/11/08

Back in December, Cambridge, MA-based BBN picked up $5.67 million from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop mobile-device software that will translate printed foreign-language documents into English. Now the company’s general R&D efforts on automated language translation are getting another boost from DARPA. BBN has won a $13 million grant through DARPA’s Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program to work on speech and text transcription, the company announced today. BBN merited the award by meeting or exceeding goals for automatic translation of Arabic newswire text and broadcast news during the program’s first two years; GALE calls for awardees to reach 90 percent accuracy by the end of the five-year research program.

Wade Roush is Xconomy's chief correspondent. You can e-mail him at wroush@xconomy.com, call him at (617) 252-7323, or follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/wroush.