One of the major issues for both the American intelligence community and the military has been the paucity of professionals in their ranks who are fluent in Arabic. Like any other major language, there are dialectic variations within the language that make fluent translation and understanding that much more difficult. One need only consider the vast dialectical differences in American English to begin to understand the kind of “nuance” that rigidly thinking machines will have to content with.

Technologists among us are developing equipment that can assist even the most hopelessly monolingual in uniform communicate with the citizens of the nation he or she is occupying. The United States Army is field testing a hand-held voice translator device developed by Integrated Wave Technologies.

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