Direct Speech-to-Speech Translation

Direct speech-to-speech translation aims to provide translation in real time for applications such as videoconferencing or automatic translation over the telephone. Although this seems like the next step in machine translation, the technology is still not mature enough for commercial products. But researchers persist. Organizations working in this field include the C-Star Consortium and the Interactive Systems Laboratory (ISL), a cooperative venture of the University of Karlsruhe in Germany and Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S.

C-Star includes companies and academic institutions from France, Germany, Italy, Japan, India, Korea, the U.K., and the U.S. In 1993, C-Star d emonstrated automatic interpretation over the phone in a series of bilingual experiments. That system required the speaker to talk very clearly and be grammatically correct, which humans normally don't do. C-Star II research aims to reduce such restrictions and create more robust interpreting systems that can recognize ordinary spontaneous speech, translate it, and turn it into synthesized speech. C-Star's goal is "multilingual speech-to-speech translation" in real applications by 1999.

The ISL's Janus speech-to-speech project deals with learning and handling new vocabularies in predefined situations, such as scheduling of appointments. It supports English, German, Spanish, Japanese, and Korean. The collaboration has developed a laptop-based speech translator that handles spontaneous, continuous, speaker-independent translation in limited domains. Translation output can be presented as synthesized speech or as text on screen or transparent goggles.

ISL has also develo ped a translating videophone station that allows one person to hear another's original voice and receive translations as subtitles or synthesized speech. When the speaker on one end makes a statement, the system returns a paraphrased version for verification. As soon as the speaker has verified it, the system translates the message and sends it to the recipient. Although the translation is not instantaneous, it allows for adequate straightforward communication.