Interpreters facilitate multi-lingual meetings but the affordable set
of languages is often smaller than what is needed. Automatic simultaneous
speech translation can extend the set of provided languages. We investigate
if such an automatic system should rather follow the original speaker,
or an interpreter to achieve better translation quality at the cost
of increased delay.
To answer the question,
we release Europarl Simultaneous Interpreting Corpus (ESIC), 10 hours
of recordings and transcripts of European Parliament speeches in English,
with simultaneous interpreting into Czech and German. We evaluate quality
and latency of speaker-based and interpreter-based spoken translation
systems from English to Czech. We study the differences in implicit
simplification and summarization of the human interpreter compared
to a machine translation system trained to shorten the output to some
extent. Finally, we perform human evaluation to measure information
loss of each of these approaches.
Cite as: Macháček, D., Žilinec, M., Bojar, O. (2021) Lost in Interpreting: Speech Translation from Source or Interpreter? Proc. Interspeech 2021, 2376-2380, doi: 10.21437/Interspeech.2021-2232
@inproceedings{machacek21_interspeech,
author={Dominik Macháček and Matúš Žilinec and Ondřej Bojar},
title={{Lost in Interpreting: Speech Translation from Source or Interpreter?}},
year=2021,
booktitle={Proc. Interspeech 2021},
pages={2376--2380},
doi={10.21437/Interspeech.2021-2232}
}