Cambridge, UK-based Prolingua Ltd is helping police throughout Europe with their enquiries by providing them with software that enables translation of operational messages into foreign languages. The company, which was set up by Cambridge University professors David Matthews and Edward Johnson, developed LinguaNet in conjunction with Kent Police, initially to help the Kent force communicate with police in the Northern French sea ports. LinguaNet’s aim, said Johnson, is to achieve cross-border communications, irrespective of language. Working on Johnson’s premise that true machine translation is, and probably always will be impossible, LinguaNet is developed around ‘purpose-built’ languages, and standardization of communication. That is to say, the company has built up a lexicon of in this case common police usage, with agreed definitions of professional terms, which avoids any ambiguity. It is, says Johnson, constantly evolving, but at present, enables the police to call up standard forms, for things like descriptions of people or vehicles, which use common, easily identifiable phrases. These can then be transmitted using a form of electronic mail, to overseas police forces, where they will be translated for the recipient. Users can also send free text messages, and the recipient can use the dictionary for basic translation of key phrases, to enable evaluation of the type of message and its importance. The user can then decide whether to call in professional translation services or not. LinguaNet has been written in C, and currently runs on stand-alone Unix personal computers. However, the company is keen to stress that it will run on any system, and they are looking at a Windows NT version at the moment. Prolingua has still not officially launched LinguaNet as a finished product. The academics insist they are still working on the development, and installed it with Kent police only as a development exercise. The company has already had enquiries from numerous police forces and law enforcement agencies around the world, and says Interpol is interested in taking the system. Prolingua Ltd is entirely funded by its two founders. However the company has attracted 1.2m pounds of European Union funding in its capacity as co-ordinator of a consortium set up to develop cross border communication systems further. The firm is currently developing multimedia add-ons to the system, to enable photographs, fingerprints, graphics and voice samples to be transmitted. It is working on enabling the system to convert text to speech, so that an audio instruction could be transmitted by telephone or radio. It is also building a prototype system using speech recognition. Johnson admits the system has already helped solve numerous crimes, and recognizes that it cannot remain in its ivory tower for much longer. He said it is likely that one of its consortium partners will take a license to begin marketing LinguaNet, but there seem to be no firm plans at present
