(..) the U.S. military is refining a handheld voice-translation device that will soon be used by police and emergency-room doctors back home.

The palm sized PDA-like Phraselator lets users speak or select from a screen of English phrases and matches them to equivalent pre-recorded phrases in other languages. (..) and records reply dialog for later translation. (..)

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Navy doctor Lee Morin generated the idea (..) during Operation Desert Storm when he loaded Arabic language audio files onto his laptop and clicked on phrases to help communicate with patients. (..)

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(..) military forces in Iraq use the device to provide information and issue commands at checkpoints, (..)

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"For homeland security, port patrol or general law enforcement, it is usually a one-way conversation and your responses are actions or physical affirmations," (..)

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A toolkit allows soldiers to (..) download phrase modules from the (..) web portal, (..)

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(..) it is inching toward full two-way voice translation.

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The next generation of the devices will also feature pictures, allowing the user to ask, "Have you seen any of these people?" (..)

(..) a researcher at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, which is helping the U.S. government (..) expects speech-to-speech machine translators to achieve incremental progress in limited domains and gradually expand two-way translation capabilities.

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In 2003, DARPA estimated that open-domain, multi-task and unconstrained dialog translation was still five to 10 years away. But the research group developing IBM's MASTOR, or multilingual automatic speech-to-speech translator system, says its DARPA-funded bidirectional voice translator is a year or two from deployment.

(..) MASTOR (..) uses algorithms to extract the concept from each sentence and match it to a comparable sentence in another language.

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