When browsing the internet recently, I came across the following piece of news: the USA are building a robot translator for military purposes. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in America has started work on a robot-translator with artificial intelligence capable of understanding various languages, instantly translating into English, and maintaining dialogue with humans through its own robot voice.

The project is called BOLT, or Broad Operational Language Translation, and its objective is to support North American troops in territories where they speak languages other than English. The robot will serve as interpreter between soldiers and civilians in the foreign country, especially in countries where, due to the complexity of the language, learning it quickly is difficult. The highest priority languages will be Arabic and Chinese.

Apparently, the robot translator will have an appearance similar to C-3PO from the Star Wars films.

There are those who doubt that this project is worth the 15 million dollars that the agency has requested from Congress for its development.

No further details are known about the project, so we’ll have to wait and see if it achieves its objectives.

Whatever standard of translation this robot reaches, personally I doubt that it will be equal to the quality of a professional human interpreter. After all, it is a machine translator, with all the risk of possible error or incorrect interpretation which they are associated with.