Constructing a Speech Translation System using Simultaneous Interpretation Data

There has been a fair amount of work on automatic speech translation systems that translate in real-time, serving as a computerized version of a simultaneous interpreter. It has been noticed in the field of translation studies that simultaneous interpreters perform a number of tricks to make the content easier to understand in real-time, including dividing their translations into small chunks, or summarizing less important content. However, the majority of previous work has not specifically considered this fact, simply using translation data (made by translators) for learning of the machine translation system. In this paper, we examine the possibilities of additionally incorporating simultaneous interpretation data (made by simultaneous interpreters) in the learning process. First we collect simultaneous interpretation data from professional simultaneous interpreters of three levels, and perform an analysis of the data. Next, we incorporate the simultaneous interpretation data in the learning of the machine translation system. As a result, the translation style of the system becomes more similar to that of a highly experienced simultaneous interpreter. We also find that according to automatic evaluation metrics, our system achieves performance similar to that of a simultaneous interpreter that has 1 year of experience.