In other words...: AT&T works to develop speech-to-speech translation for Chinese, Japanese

Suppose you're in China and you don't speak Chinese. You walk out of the airport, scrounge up a cab, and now you want to tell the taxi driver where you'd like to go, but English won't cut it. Before you end up on a country road outside greater Shanghai, you need some way to communicate.

It is for just a situation such as this that AT&T Labs is working with the Chinese Academy of Sciences and ATR Interpreting Telecommunications Research in Japan to develop prototypes for speech-to-speech translation.

If these prototypes work the way the carrier hopes, you will be able to use your wireless phone to call your Chinese taxi driver, speak English, and the new technology could translate it into Chinese.

True, creating a prototype may be a long way from offering the service, but AT&T is hopeful. "We'd like to create the capability, and then AT&T can create the service," said David Berkley, vice president of speech and image processing research at AT&T Labs. "We have a tremendous desire to make it real."

Speech-to-speech prototypes for both languages will stem from work by AT&T previously done for English-to-Spanish translation, said Hiyan Alshawi, senior researcher of speech translation products for AT&T Labs.

However, the Chinese and Japanese programs are different. The 18-month Japanese program is with ATR-ITL, a company that has done previous work on speech-to-speech translation. This research will focus mainly on operator services. The collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which has not yet done speech-to-speech research, is a five-year program and will focus on services for common situations for business travelers and tourists-communicating in taxis, retail stores and restaurants in other countries.

The common technology on which all these prototypes will be based is statistical-based translation, Alshawi said. "The system works with the relationship between words and phrases," he said. "The statistics are based on how words are reordered."

So a call made by a tourist in a taxi in China would go to a server that would translate his or her speech into text that is given statistical value. It would then be translated into Chinese text, analyzed for pronunciation and then converted into Chinese speech-which would be presented to the taxi driver. Although English is already difficult to translate into Chinese because of the difference in written characters, the primary difficulty is in the way people talk, Alshawi said.

"There is a lot of variability in how people speak. People hesitate, they repeat words," he said. "And speech-to-text translation is already prone to errors. When you combine the two there could be a cascade of mistakes."

The capability will also need to be fast, Berkley added.

If the idea behind the project is instant Chinese speech-to-speech translation, it could be very difficult, said Jessica Madoc-Jones, associate director of Asia-Pacific communications for The Yankee Group. "When you think that there are over 200 colloquial forms of Chinese, that's a huge project," she said. She explained that Chinese is a tonal language, and that it is the difference between tones and the context of the words that allow speakers to distinguish similar words.

Both the AT&T researchers and Madoc-Jones said they know of no other carriers doing such research. Companies such as Microsoft are developing technologies to convert characters from English to Chinese, Madoc-Jones said.

Berkley stressed that these are prototypes, not services. But both he and Alshawi are hopeful for the potential of the collaboration.

"This technology could also be used within the U.S.," Alshawi said. "Right now translation at AT&T is completely human-operated."

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