Tum Ho Who?

According to Wired, a group of linguistic researchers were given an assignment by DARPA to develop a tool to translate between Hindi and English - within a month! It is a mock run for a hypothetical situation where it might become necessary to translate quickly between some foreign language and English due to war or a terrorist attack. It would be great if a tool like that found it's way to Google's language toolbox. However, if the objective is to monitor opinion in India, having a Hindi-English tool is probably unnecessary. For one, english newspapers are widely read throughout India, and as far as regional newspapers go, Hindi represents a very small segment of the nation - every state speaks a different language and has dozens of newspapers in that language. It's a great exercise though, and hopefully the research results will find civilian applications too.