From John Markoff in today’s NY Times:
Most Americans likely have difficulty understanding the broadcasts of Al Jazeera, the Arab news network, but several government agencies now can watch it while simultaneously receiving an English translation of the programming. Virage Inc., a San Mateo, Calif., a maker of Internet video technologies, has recently supplied several unnamed United States intelligence agencies with a system that will provide real-time voice recognition and English translation of foreign-language news broadcasts.
The system, which was financed last year by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, can run on any fast personal computer, generating scrolling text displays of both Arabic and translated English text. DARPA is conducting a research project known as Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization, whose aim is to provide English speakers with working translations of languages like Arabic and Chinese.