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Worldwide globalization has accelerated the need for free
communication. Since it takes a long time to master another language,
technology that enables the automatic translation of a different
language is keenly anticipated. Speech translation systems
translate spoken sentences into different languages interactively. They
can realize ultimate language-barrier-free communication (Figure 1).
We have been developing speech translation systems for the promising
target genre of travel conversation. The systems must be robust to
noise because when you travel, there is a lot of noise in interior and
exterior environments. Also, it is necessary to translate colloquial
expressions for travel conversation. We have developed travel
conversation speech translation systems that translate utterance by
utterance in a real-world environment (Figure 2). This speech
translation system runs on a stand-alone ultra mobile PC, and
translates between any language pairing among Japanese, English and
Chinese.
This speech translation system can run in a mobile network environment
such as on a cell phone. We are now developing this system for a
practical use as a translation assistance tool for traveling abroad. To
improve the system, we are going to build a mechanism to collect
actually used speech translation results in real time and update the
translation system daily to upgrade the performance.
Fig.1 Image showing a dialog using our Fig.2 Our ultra mobile PC-based speech
speech translation
service
translation system
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