Speech to speech translation: a communication boon

An average person speaks 11000–25000 words per day making speech the most common way of expressing ourselves. Be it a conversation, dialogue, speech, presentations or any general talks, we use speech to make other as well as ourselves understand thoughts and actions. If either of the side is unaware of the language of communication, the cycle will be incomplete. Hence we need a system that can bridge this language barrier. Speech to speech translation is one such system that can play important role by facilitating communication between persons speaking different languages. Worldwide efforts are being made to achieve this goal and implement it practically for use by common man. The present paper describes a major international and inter-institutional effort in this direction—in which an attempt is being made to automate speech translation among 23 Asian, Middle East and European languages including Hindi through a consortium project led by NICT Japan [1, 2]. The three key modules namely Speech Recognition, Language Translation and Speech Synthesis required for Hindi are being designed, developed and implemented by CDAC, Noida as Indian counterpart in the project. The language specific technology and the parallel corpora and the speech unit (segmental) database developed have been described. Technical details of this first ever effort, modules and their performance in the communication system have been discussed.