Rapidly sharable and jointly usable training across coalition partners needs to linguistically and culturally adapt (that is, localize) to the languages of non-Anglosphere allies representing frontline actors with limited or potentially no English proficiency. Traditionally, localization has been a time and labor-intensive process, with an expert needing over two months to translate a mid-sized book. Meanwhile, training exercises are charged with responding to total development timelines of days and weeks, not months and years, in order to respond to evolving realities of the operational world. In this frame, traditional localization becomes a major bottleneck for coalition endeavors. In rapidly unfolding situations, allies simply cannot wait months and years on training needed tonight or to address next week’s mission in languages readily understood on the front line—that is, to realize the long-aspired dream of locally tailored training to address boots-on-the-ground needs.
Enter the emergent artificial intelligence technology of neural machine translation, which can do in mere minutes that which takes seasoned organic linguists an hour, making coalition-wide, multilanguage deployment in days and weeks feasible, with ever improving complexity accounted for. This is made possible by machine learning, that is, training artificial recurrent neural networks to translate from one natural language to another.
We built artificial-intelligence based neural engines, timed their translation of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) training materials, and measured their accuracy using the bilingual understudy evaluation (BLEU) metric. Our engine translated from Russian 1,169.51% faster and 58.37% more accurately than our professional human linguist used as a control. Our Polish neural engine was 17.29% more accurate and 488.45% faster than human. Our Lemko translation engines are the world’s first and scored a decent BLEU of 14.80. Meanwhile, we did the above on an inexpensive laptop computer in an air-gapped, access-controlled environment cut off from the outside world.