An experiment on Korean-to-English and Korean-to-Japanese spoken language translation

We have implemented a Korean-to-English and Korean-to-Japanese spoken language translation system prototype. The system can translate speech in the travel planning domain with 5,000 word vocabulary. In our prototype, we concentrate on how to transfer the intention of a user to the partner in spite of the current limitations of spoken language processing technology. We measured the end-to-end performance of the prototype to test whether the output of the system is understandable using a subjective measure. We also used an objective measure to evaluate the system performance and found that it generates coherent results with the subjective test. The test result shows that the user can understand the output even in the case where the system cannot translate speech correctly. Thus it is important to provide even partially correct translation output to the user, in order not to neglect the possibility that the user can infer the intended message using the context and his/her intelligence.