Multiple-Translation Spotting for Mandarin-Taiwanese Speech-to-Speech Translation

The critical issues involved in speech-to-speech translation are obtaining proper source segments and synthesizing accurate target speech. Therefore, this article develops a novel multiple-translation spotting method to deal with these issues efficiently. Term multiple-translation spotting refers to the task of extracting target-language synthesis patterns that correspond to a given set of source-language spotted patterns in conditional multiple pairs of speech patterns known to be translation patterns. According to the extracted synthesis patterns, the target speech can be properly synthesized by using a waveform segment concatenation-based synthesis method. Experiments were conducted with the languages of Mandarin and Taiwanese. The results reveal that the proposed approach can achieve translation understanding rates of 80% and 76% on average for Mandarin/Taiwanese translation and Taiwanese/Mandarin translation, respectively.