Challenges with Rapid Adaptation of Speech Translation Systems to New Language Pairs

Although we have far from solved the issues in porting speech translation systems to new languages, we have gathered sufficient experience by now to identify a number of major challenges in the process. Although well-defined processes exist for building speech recognition, speech synthesis and statistical machine translation models, they still require both significant native speaker involvement and linguistic expertise. As the core technology improves we believe we will see increasing cultural and social issues in contributions from native speakers. This paper identifies some of these issues and presents our initial attempts to build tools that we hope will eventually allow linguistically naive native informants build complete speech translation systems