Real-Time Speech-to-Speech Translation for PDAs

In this paper we present a speech-to-speech translation system configured for translingual communication in English and colloquial Iraqi on a mobile, handheld device. The end-to-end system employs a medium/large vocabulary n-gram speech recognition engine for recognizing English and colloquial Iraqi, a question canonicalizer for mapping a recognized English question or command to one of the questions supported in the system, a concept translation engine for translating recognized Iraqi text, and a text-to-speech synthesis engine for playing back the English translation for the Iraqi to the English speaker. In addition to describing the system architecture and the functionality of the components, we present optimization techniques that enable low-latency, real-time speech recognition on low-power hardware platforms.