To attack this problem, the methods of two branches of computational linguistics, information retrieval and machine translation, can be combined. Writing these programs requires extremely detailed descriptions of both languages, and the results so far are crude compared to the skills of human analysts. Still, such programs are becoming more and more helpful as they become more sophisticated. For spoken material, such as intercepted phone calls, computers need to be programmed to recognize speech. For this the methods of another sort of linguist, the acoustic phonetician, are needed.
Every language uses a different set of sounds and sound combinations.
The more we know about the sound patterns of a language, the better we can program our computers to understand speech in that language. Here, history speaks for itself. Two examples will give you an idea of how important these messages are for our country's safety. In 1943 the U.S. Army began to study thousands of coded 'diplomatic' telegrams they had intercepted from the Soviets. The effort to decode these messages went on for years, and dozens of linguists were recruited to help with the translation and decoding.