Issue #18 – Simultaneous Translation using Neural MT

23 Nov18

Author: Dr. Rohit Gupta, Sr. Machine Translation Scientist @ Iconic

The term “simultaneous translation” or “simultaneous interpretation” refers to the case where a translator begins translating just a few seconds after a speaker begins speaking, and finishes just a few seconds after the speaker ends.  There has been a lot of PR and noise about some recent proclamations which were covered well in a recent article on Slator. In this week’s post, we are cutting through the hype to take a look at the science. Let’s take a look at why simultaneous translation is a difficult task and to what extent machine translation can help.

A quick glance at the problem

In simultaneous translation, the speaker continues speaking in a normal fashion without any pause for translation. The interpreter speaks in the desired target language after first listening to a few words from the speaker and continues to do so, following only a few words behind the speaker. The process is very challenging (kudos, interpreters!) as one needs to continue listening to new words and keep them in memory while translating and speaking the previous spoken words. Therefore,
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