Simultaneous German-English Lecture Translation

In an increasingly globalized world, situations in which people of different native tongues have to communicate with each other become more and more frequent. In many such situations, human interpreters are prohibitively expensive or simply not available. Automatic spoken language translation (SLT), as a cost-effective solution to this dilemma, has re-ceived increased attention in recent years. For a broad num-ber of applications, including live SLT of lectures and oral presentations, these automatic systems should ideally oper-ate in real time and with low latency. Large and highly spe-cialized vocabularies as well as strong variations in speaking style – ranging from read speech to free presentations suf-fering from spontaneous events – make simultaneous SLT of lectures a challenging task. This paper presents our progress in building a simulta-neous German-English lecture translation system. We em-phasize some of the challenges which are particular to this language pair and propose solutions to tackle some of the problems encountered. 1