Sync/Trans: Simultaneous Machine Interpretation between English and Japanese

摘要

This paper describes Sync/Trans, an incremental spoken language translation system. The system has been being developed for efficiently translating a spontaneous speech dialogue between an English speaker and a Japanese speaker. Its purpose being to behave as a simultaneous interpreter, the system produces the target output synchronously with the source input. Sync/Trans has the following features: (1) the system consists of modules that work in a synchronous fashion, (2) the system translates the source language possibly word-by-word according to the appearance order, (3) the system utilizes grammatically illformed expressions for the speech output, and (4) the system corrects the grammatical ill-formedness of the speech input at a pretty early stage. An experimental system for translating English speech into Japanese speech has been implemented. A few experimental results have shown Sync/Trans to be a promising system for simultaneous interpretation.