TC-STAR

The TC-STAR project is envisaged as a long-term effort to advance research in all core technologies for Speech-to-Speech Translation (SST). SST technology is a combination of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Spoken Language Translation (SLT) and Text to Speech (TTS) (speech synthesis). The objectives of the project are ambitious: making a breakthrough in SST that significantly reduces the gap between human and machine translation performance. The project targets a selection of unconstrained conversational speech domains—speeches and broadcast news—and three languages: European English, European Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese. Accurate translation of unrestricted speech is well beyond the capability of today’s state-of-the-art research systems. Therefore, advances are needed to improve the state-of the-art technologies for speech recognition and speech translation.