Research activities on spontaneous speech translation

In the coming 21st century, "global communication among different languages" will become more promising and more realistic. However, despite the great expectations of society for such an ideal speech translating system, there remains a great number of difficult problems related to acoustic and linguistic phenomena that need to be overcome. This is because spoken language is characterized by the use of colloquial idioms, occasional omission of words and inversion of word order. The paper describes research activities for spontaneous speech translation and international research collaboration. Some promising applications are also shown as examples of cross language global communications.