Advances in Speech-to-Speech Translation Technologies
Mark Seligman, Alex Waibel · Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2019
Automated speech translation, long a dream, has come into widespread use, as enterprises, application developers, and government agencies have become aware. Real-world S2ST applications have been tested locally over the past decade in consumer, healthcare, military, and humanitarian missions, and several projects aim to enable automatic cross-language communications at the 2020 Olympic Games to be held in Tokyo. Accordingly, this chapter provides a survey of the field’s technologies, approaches, companies, projects, and target use cases. (It is based on an industry report sponsored by the Translation Automation Users Society, released in 2017.) Sections examine the Past, Present, and Future of speech-to-speech translation. The first provides an orientation concerning issues in speech translation and a capsule history; the second snapshots technical achievements and representative participants in the burgeoning current scene; and the third speculates about future directions, with emphasis on platforms and form factors, big data, knowledge source integration, and the roles of human and automatic translators.