Raytheon to Provide Iraqi Arabic, Pashto Translation Devices to US Army

Raytheon has developed software for the US Army's translation system that allows soldiers to communicate with Iraqi Arabic and Pashto speakers.

WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — US defense giant Raytheon has developed software for the US Army's Machine Foreign Language Translation System that allows soldiers to communicate with Iraqi Arabic and Pashto speakers and translate foreign language documents, Raytheon said in a statement on Monday.

"Raytheon BBN Technologies has been awarded $4 million to provide automatic speech recognition, machine translation, text-to-speech, and optical character recognition software licenses for one year to the Army's Machine Foreign Language Translation System Program Office," the statement explained.

Matched with Raytheon, BBN technologies software, the Machine Foreign Language Translation System will allow US soldiers to communicate with Iraqi Arabic and Pashto speakers, the statement claimed. Soldiers will also be able to optically scan the text of foreign language documents and convert them to English.

The translation software will work on handheld Android's, Window's based laptops, and a server-based intelligence system used at the battalion level, the statement added.

The Army began the Machine Foreign Language Translation System program in 2011.