METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR TIME-SYNCHRONIZED TRANSLATION AND SYNTHESIS OF NATURAL-LANGUAGE SPEECH

A multi-lingual time-synchronized translation system and method provide automatic time-synchronized spoken translations of spoken phrases. The multi-lingual time-synchronized translation system includes a phrase-spotting mechanism, optionally, a language understanding mechanism, a translation mechanism, a speech output mechanism and an event measuring mechanism. The phrase-spotting mechanism identifies a spoken phrase from a restricted domain of phrases. The language understanding mechanism, if present, maps the identified phrase onto a small set of formal phrases. The translation mechanism maps the formal phrase onto a well-formed phrase in one or more target languages. The speech output mechanism produces high-quality output speech using the output of the event measuring mechanism for time synchronization. The event-measuring mechanism measures the duration of various key events in the source phrase. Event duration could be, for example, the overall duration of the input phrase, the duration of the phrase with interword silences omitted, or some other relevant durational features. The present invention recognizes the quality improvements can be achieved by restricting the task domain under consideration.