An analysis of machine translation and speech synthesis in speech-to-speech translation system

This paper provides an analysis of the impacts of machine translation and speech synthesis on speech-to-speech translation systems. The speech-to-speech translation system consists of three components: speech recognition, machine translation and speech synthesis. Many techniques for integration of speech recognition and machine translation have been proposed. However, speech synthesis has not yet been considered. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on machine translation and speech synthesis, and report a subjective evaluation to analyze the impact of each component. The results of these analyses show that the naturalness and intelligibility of synthesized speech are strongly affected by the fluency of the translated sentences.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: ICASSP
• Authors: Kei Hashimoto, Junichi Yamagishi, William J. Byrne, Simon King, Keiichi Tokuda
• Keywords: ICASSP 2011, Machine Translation, Signal Processing, Speech Synthesis, Speech-to-speech Translation