Last year DARPA launched a project that aims to create real-time translation software. It’s called GALE, for Global Autonomous Language Exploitation. It hired three teams of researchers to chase the problem for up to five years. DARPA’s three choices for GALE contestants were among the best of the best: IBM, backed by a $6 billion annual research budget, SRI International, a $300 million, nonprofit research organization based in Silicon Valley, and BBN Technologies, a $200 million research contractor headquartered in Cambridge. The projects aims to create software that can listen to TV broadcasts or phone conversations and read Web sites in Arabic and Chinese, translate them into English and summarize the key elements for humans.