Officials have revealed that Ratheon's BBN Technologies was given $17 million to continue work on a special language translation program for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

It was also notified by officials that work on the Global Autonomous Language Exploitation program, is in the final year of a 5-year effort.

The purpose of GALE is development and application of software to transcribe, translate, and distill large volumes of speech and text in multiple languages, all with more than 90 percent accuracy by the end of the program.

The capability would allow U. S. analysts recognize critical information in foreign languages, said Raytheon, in a news release.

According to BBN President Tad Elmer, "DARPA's GALE program is already responsible for many great advances in machine translation and BBN has deployed systems for monitoring live broadcasts in foreign languages in more than two dozen locations. This new funding will allow us to achieve an even higher level of machine translation accuracy."

It has also been reported that the company described its approach to the system as combining output transcriptions and translations from multiple systems to obtain a translation that is better than any of the component system translations.

The company said, "The team is using automatic adaptation and contextually aware processing at all system levels to optimize performance across different languages, dialects, topics, speakers and semantic nuance to deliver the relevant information." (With inputs from Agencies)