Rapid Development of an Afrikaans English Speech-to-Speech Translator

Rapid Development of an Afrikaans-English Speech-to-Speech Translator Herman A. Engelbrecht Department of E&E Engineering University of Stellenbosch, South Africa hebrecht@sun.ac.za Tanja Schultz Interactive Systems Laboratories Carnegie Mellon University, USA tanja@cs.cmu.edu Abstract In this paper we investigate the rapid deployment of a two- way Afrikaans to English Speech-to-Speech Translation sys- tem. We discuss the approaches and amount of work in- volved to port a system to a new language pair, i.e. the steps required to rapidly adapt ASR, MT and TTS compo- nent to Afrikaans under limited time and data constraints. The resulting system represents the first prototype built for Afrikaans to English speech translation. 1. Introduction In this paper we describe the rapid deployment of a two-way Afrikaans to English Speech-to-Speech Translation system. This research was performed as part of a collaboration be- tween the University of Stellenbosch and Carnegie Mellon University. Using speech and text data supplied by the Uni- versity of Stellenbosch, a native Afrikaans speaker developed the Afrikaans automatic speech recognition (ASR), machine translation (MT) and text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) compo- nents over a period of 2.5 months. The components were built using existing software tools created by the Interactive Systems Laboratories (ISL). The prototype is designed to run on a laptop or desktop computer using a close-talking head- set microphone. Afrikaans is a Dutch derivative that is one the 11 of- ficial languages in the Republic of South Africa. The 11 languages consists of 2 Germanic languages: English and Afrikaans, and 9 Ntu (or Bantu) languages: isiNdebele, Se- pedi, SeSotho, Swazi, Xitsonga, Setswana, Tshivenda, isiX- hosa, isiZulu. The majority of the population speaks two of the 11 languages: their native mother-tongue and English most often chosen as the second language. Therefore English can be regarded as the pivot language in South African cul- ture and is the most natural choice to translate to and from. Afrikaans was chosen because of the following three reasons: (i) Of the remaining 10 official languages, Afrikaans has the longest written history and therefore the most available text data. (ii) Unlike the Ntu languages, Afrikaans has the same language root as English and therefore the similarities should help in developing Afrikaans-English translation. (iii) The developer is fluent in both Afrikaans and English, but does not speak any of the Ntu languages. The paper is organised into four parts. In the first part we will discuss some of the characteristics of Afrikaans. In the second part we will present the system architecture of the prototype and discuss the different development strate- gies that were chosen for each component of the system. The third part will discuss the Afrikaans data resources that were available and the last part will discuss the implementation details and performance of the prototype system. 2. Language Characteristics of Afrikaans The following discussion of the characteristics of Afrikaans has been obtained from [1]. 2.1. History Afrikaans is linguistically closely related to 17th century Dutch, and to modern Dutch by extension. Dutch and Afrikaans are mutually understandable. Other less closely related …

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