The IRST English-Spanish translation system for european parliament speeches

This paper presents the spoken language translation system developed at FBK-irst during the TC-STAR project. The system integrates automatic speech recognition with machine translation through the use of confusion networks, which permit to represent a huge number of transcription hypotheses generated by the speech recognizer. Confusion networks are efficiently decoded by a statistical machine translation system which computes the most probable translation in the target language. This paper presents the whole architecture developed for the translation of political speeches held at the European Parliament, from English to Spanish and vice versa, and at the Spanish Parliament, from Spanish to English.