Do You Speak the Language?

A technology poised to enter the market may be your salvation. ViA Inc., a Burnsville, Minn., wearable computer manufacturer, is creating a translator for the Office of Naval Research to be tested by Marines on maneuvers in Korea and South America this summer.

"Our real focus is to develop and deploy a mobile language translation device," says Capt. Tim Singer, deputy department head of the human systems science and technology department at the agency. The small, wearable computers already know Spanish and Hangul, the Korean language. Arabic, German, French and Japanese will be added.

The unit "hears" the speaker in his own language, renders spoken words to text, then translates the text to the foreign tongue, which is read by a speech synthesizer and broadcast through a tiny speaker. It translates foreign speech for the wearer by reversing the process and broadcasting in English, performing as would a human translator.

ViA's wearable translator weighs 3 pounds and is a fully functional personal computer that runs Microsoft Corp.'s Windows 2000 operating system. It operates on a processor called the Crusoe, made by Transmeta Corp., designed to consume small amounts of energy.

"Our unit is powerful enough to run the dictation engines, the machine translation and the application that speaks the result of speech to text," says Jim Albers, ViA's chief software engineer. All the technology is off-the-shelf.

ViA says its wearable costs around $5,000 per unit depending on the add-ons purchased. However, Albers says ViA's goal is to bring the price down so the machines will be more palatable to the commercial marketplace.