NICT/ATR Chinese-Japanese-English Speech-to-Speech Translation System

This paper describes the latest version of the Chinese-Japanese-English handheld speech-to-speech translation system developed by NICT/ATR, which is now ready to be deployed for travelers. With the entire speech-to-speech translation function being implemented into one terminal, it realizes real-time, location-free speech-to-speech translation. A new noise-suppression technique notably improves the speech recognition performance. Corpus-based approaches of speech recognition, machine translation, and speech synthesis enable coverage of a wide variety of topics and portability to other languages. Test results show that the character accuracy of speech recognition is 82%-94% for Chinese speech, with a bilingual evaluation understudy score of machine translation is 0.55–0.74 for Chinese-Japanese and Chinese-English.