Translation of conversational speech with JANUS-II

We investigate the possibility of translating continuous spoken conversations in a cross talk environment. This is a task known to be difficult for human translators due to several factors. It is characterized by rapid and even overlapping turn taking, a high degree of coarticulation, and fragmentary language. We describe experiments using both push to talk as well as cross talk recording conditions. Our results indicate that conversational speech recognition and translation is possible, even in a free crosstalk environment. To date, our system has achieved performances of over 80%, acceptable translations on transcribed input, and over 70% acceptable translations on speech input recognized with a 70-80% word accuracy. The system's performance on spontaneous conversations recorded in a cross talk environment is shown to be as good and even slightly superior to the simpler and easier push to talk scenario.