Machine Translator Helps Haitian Relief Effort

Among the rapid responders to the devastating January 12th earthquake in Haiti – which left between as many as 200,000 people dead and 1.5 million homeless – are linguists and computer scientists. Among them is former Carnegie Mellon University linguist Greg Allen who went to Haiti in 1990s on U.S. army contract.

Allen was fluent in Creole, the language widely spoken in Haiti. His mission on the project, dubbed Diplomat, was to develop an English/Creole speech and text translation system.

ALLEN: "I spent nine months collecting data from different people within the Haitian community. And then we in-house translated everything that we could for a period of two years."

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