Air Warrior Col. John W. Thompson - KMI Media Group

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Act Globally, Talk Locally wa r a n D w o r D s: Co u r s e s, H a r D w a r e let s o l D i e r s C o m m u n i C a t e w i tH l o C a l s. The United States has fought much bigger wars than the war on terror, but it has never fought in so many places, and in so many ways, where speaking so many local languages is so essential. The challenge of communicating globally has expanded traditional language instruction and led to rapid innovation in technology to bridge communication gaps. The Holy Grail of technology is a field device that can do two-way translation of natural speech. That may be coming soon. The U.S. Army’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School now runs the second-largest language school in the country, after the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif., according to Lieutenant Colonel Rusty Nance, chief of Language and Human Dynamics. His school trained 2,000 students in 13 foreign languages this year and expects to ramp up to 17 languages for 2,100 students next year. “Unlike Monterey, we seek oral proficiency only, listening and speaking,” Nance explained. The goal is proficiency of 1+ as measured by International Language Roundtable (ILR) standards, though a simple 1 is sufficient for graduation. “The most important languages are for where the bullets are flying, like Arabic, 32 | SOTECH 8.9 Pashto and Urdu,” Nance said. “But Russian and Mandarin Chinese will also be important.” The Center has a major French program and is tentatively planning to add Czech, Hungarian and Polish. The students are all Army and special operations forces with military occupational specialties of 18 or 18A for SOF officers, 37 for Army military information support or 38 for civil affairs. Other services have similar and quite good language programs, but these are orders of magnitude smaller than that at the Special Warfare Center. Language class takes five hours per day for four months in French, Spanish or Indonesian, six months for other languages. SOF soldiers must pass these courses before they go on to further training. The center has just started intermediate training, to ILR level 2+, for a select number of students and is considering going to ILR level 3+. Instructors are private contractors provided by MiLanguages, but this contract is up for bid. There is a push to bring instructors on board as government employees. This may be difficult, as the center must employ U.S. citizens, which many current instructors are not. By He n r y Ca n a D a y, soteCH Co r r e s p o n D e n t C a n a D a y H@k m i m e D i a g r o u p.C o m Personal instruction in classes is by far the best way to teach languages, Nance emphasized, and technology is only used for reinforcement. The center uses Rosetta Stone, CL-150’s Rapid Rote and authentic materials like broadcast feeds for reinforcement. In addition to language, all center students are trained in the cultures of intended deployment locations. And long after they leave the center, soldiers can still tap its resources. Nance has a sustainment program for deployed troops to help them retain their new language, and even a contingency program for soldiers trained in one language but assigned to another location. Transparent Language developed CL-150, an extremely broad suite of products and services to help train and assess soldiers in about 80 critical languages. President Michael Quinlan said special operations as well as Marine, Navy and Air Force units have enterprise-wide licenses to use CL-150 both in the United States and in theater, online or off, for both initial training and refresher courses “Where we differ from other language products is that we support learning for special government purposes,” Quinlan said. “We go far beyond the standard conversations.” www.SOTECH-kmi.com
And Transparent also does assessments, according to ILR standards. Transparent has plenty of enhancements coming out, including new operational culture kits developed in close coordination with special operations and the Marines, and it has just released an iPhone version of CL-150’s Rapid Rote. Progressive Expert Consulting provides a virtual classroom environment for training in a wide variety of languages to special operations units in the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force. This is live training by instructors conducted over the Internet at scheduled times, emphasized Michael Feng, vice president system integration at PEC. The PEC classes teach proficiency at several ILR levels, 1, 2 and 3, according to needs. Students need only a webcam, headset and Internet connection, preferably with plenty of bandwidth. Classes can be as large or as small as necessary and the students can take the classes wherever they are, at home or stationed around the world. “We try to make the technology disappear, and let them concentrate on learning the language,” Feng said. MiLanguages provides initial, sustainment and enhancement language training, plus cultural training, in more than 100 languages. It prides itself on fulfilling even rare language requirements on the shortest notice. “It’s not unusual for us to receive a specification late on a Thursday for a class that begins the following week,” said Marketing Manager Holly Bouma. “MiLanguages instructors are in place and ready to instruct at 8:00 a.m. on Monday.” The firm is able to respond quickly by maintaining a wide and deep pool of instructors through continual recruitment and partnerships with organizations in 40 countries. Bouma said the firm will remain fully abreast of the new training techniques. reCruiting te C H n o l o g y BBN has worked with Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) language programs for the last 30 years, according to Prem Natarajan, head of speech, language and multimedia at BBN. “We started with speech recognition, then GALE [Global Autonomous Language Exploitation] added translation from text and speech to English so English- Holly Bouma language analysts could work with foreign text and multimedia like TV, radio and cable,” Natarajan explained. The sheer volume of important information available in so many foreign languages meant it was impossible to train enough analysts to interpret them. BBN now has 30 large enterprise-wide monitoring systems installed inside and outside the United States. “Each monitors several channels, plus Web monitoring, and can crawl through the Web without leaving footprints,” said Natarajan. BBN monitors media in eight languages now, including Arab, Pashto and Mandarin Chinese, with more on the way. GALE monitors transcribe speech to text in the same foreign language with 12 to 15 percent error rates in some languages and 25 to 35 percent errors in others. Generally, straight news can be transcribed with greater accuracy than conversation. Even though this is not translation, it is a huge time-saver for analysts. “They do not have to spend time listening to or selecting materials to analyze; they can pick the text or tag the video they need and take it to a linguist,” Natarajan said. BBN also works with DARPA on spoken languages in the Communication and Translation System for Tactical Use, or TRANSTAC, program. Here, the objective is to help people who speak different languages but have the same mission collaborate effectively through an advanced speechto-speech translation device called TransTalk. TransTalk devices, just now starting deployment on smartphones in the field, do two-way translation of spoken speech in specific areas for English and six foreign languages. “This has been seven years in the making; now we are there,” Natarajan added. TransTalk does not translate canned phrases, but handles natural speech, using a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words in both English and the other languages, and uses stochastic techniques for translating meaning by context. For two years, BBN has worked with DARPA’s Multilingual Automatic Document Classification Analysis and Translation program to scan pages of Arabic handwriting. “Now this is moving to applied research,” Natarajan said. BBN is also working on tracking opinion in foreign language media and generating charts to summarize it. SRI International also worked on DAR- PA’s GALE program to develop large-scale systems for translating standard Arabic and Chinese speech and text from newswires, Web text, broadcast news and conversations into English. SRI led a consortium of 11 academic and industry organizations for this effort. “We pioneered a novel hybrid translation approach using human knowledge and statistical modeling,” noted Horacio Franco, chief scientist in the Speech Technology and Research Laboratory at SRI. For TRANSTAC, SRI is developing small portable speech-to-speech translators on smartphones. “Our system runs on the Android Nexus One smartphone,” said Franco. The system works for force protection, medical interviews and dialogues for building relationships with civilians. It does two-way translation between English and Iraqi Arabic, Malay, Farsi, Dari and Pashto with a large vocabulary of free-form continuous speech. “We have the capability to create translation systems in other languages in a short time frame,” Franco stressed. Any Language Anywhere Any Time Language Training (Live or Online) Immersions (Domestic or Abroad) Cultural Training Translation Testing MiLanguages, Corp. info@milanguages.com 866.319.1244 www.MiLANGUAGES.com www.SOTECH-kmi.com SOTECH 8.9 | 33
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