Bjorn Erik Bringert

Speech-Enabled Hybrid Multilingual Translation for Mobile Devices

This paper presents an architecture and a prototype for speech-to-speech translation on Android devices, based on GF (Grammatical Framework). From the user’s point of view, the advantage is that the system works off-line and yet has a lean size; it also gives, as a bonus, grammatical information useful for language learners. From the developer’s point of view, the advantage is the open architecture that permits the customization of the system to new languages and for special purposes. Thus the architecture can be used for controlled-language-like translators that deliver very high quality, which is the traditional strength of GF. However, this paper focuses on a general-purpose system that allows arbitrary input. It covers eight languages.