Full Six-Directional Japanese/Chinese/English Speech-to-Speech Translator

Toshiba has developed a new hybrid translation method that realizes a speech-to-speech translator for all six translation directions among the Japanese, Chinese, and English languages. This hybrid method enables the system to produce natural and accurate translations for arbitrary spoken and recognized utterances. Two of Toshiba's original complementary machine translation (MT) methods are utilized: forest-driven rule-based MT, and chunk- and stochastic-type example-based MT.

Several field tests of this system were performed in Japan, China, and Australia in 2008, with participation by more than 130 native-speaking subjects for these three languages in total. The results of these field tests demonstrated that about 70% of typical tasks in overseas travel situations can be achieved within about two minutes.

Configuration of Japanese/Chinese/English speech-to-speech translator