Soldiers can't prevent the diplomatic misunderstandings that breed warfare, but the Pentagon hopes a handheld electronic interpreter in GIs' packs can prevent language barriers from claiming lives on the battlefield.

To be successful, such a gadget has to go way beyond the electronic phrase books and generic tourist directories available today.

A new device being tested at the Office of Naval Research shows a lot of promise, according to Joel Davis, a neurobiologist there. "We have good ones now; they'll be better in a few years, and eventually fantastic," he said.

Over the past several years, the Navy has pumped about $4 million into Davis' program to develop simultaneous machine translation and interpretation. On Friday, the Senate Armed Services Committee will see a demonstration of the choice fruit of that effort, a blend of voice recognition, speech synthesis and translation technologies called Interact.

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