New technology substitutes interpreter

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American and European researchers from the International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies (InterACT), a collaboration between Carnegie Mellon and the University of Karlsruhe in Germany, have developed a technology that provides live translation of speech from one language to another.

According to the NewScientist.com, Alex Waibel, a professor at both universities, demonstrated the system that almost instantly translates speech from one language to another by giving a talk in English that was converted simultaneously into German and Spanish. "We want everyone working together but to maintain our individuality," Waibel told reporters.

This speech translation software backs up its use of speech recognition and voice synthesis with statistical techniques to speed up the selection of words and phrases. These techniques are based on scans of a vast number of previously translated documents in order to build probabilistic rules for translation.

Statistical translation technologies are the focus of attention of other research groups and companies. In August 2005, internet giant Google won a machine translation competition organised by the US government. One reason for Google's success is the vast quantity of translated information that it has collated for analysis.

Source: NewScientist