ASIA Japan : NEC Corporation announced that it has succeeded in the development of the world's first, automatic, Japanese<->Chinese speech translation software, capable of real-time, speech-to-speech translation of travel-related Chinese and Japanese conversation on a PDA (mobile information terminal).

Operable on a commercial PDA, the newly developed automatic translation software boasts a rich vocabulary of 50,000 Japanese and 36,000 Chinese words, and realizes automatic speech-to-speech interpretation of travel conversation. A wide range of travel conversation used in a variety of travel situations was taken into consideration during the development of the software, and it has principally been enabled by the realization of speech recognition of general conversation of standard spoken Chinese (Mandarin/Putonghua). Although standard spoken Chinese is the same nationwide, accents differ according to region, making speech recognition complex. In order to combat this issue, data of spoken conversation was gathered from a large number of people from different regions in China, allowing the creation of a large-scale Chinese-conversation speech corpus (note*). This enabled the realization of speech recognition of general Chinese conversation, regardless of the origin of the accent of the person conversing.

The features of this software include:
(1) A parallel, large-vocabulary, continuous speech recognition engine, which is built with a database consisting of a wide range of conversation sounds and words that enables accurate speech recognition of spoken words.
(2) A compact translation engine for translation of spoken words.
(3) An advanced wave-concatenative speech synthesis engine, which realizes high-performance reading through an advanced, wave-concatenative speech synthesis method based on a wide range of speech data.
(4) A total integration module that controls collaborative operation of the speech recognition engine, the machine translation engine and the speech synthesis engine, realizing real-time, automatic Japanese<->Chinese speech translation on a PDA.

In recent years, with the advancement of an information society and increased freedom of movement across borders, the dynamic development of technology supporting automatic speech interpretation and translation to support communication between different languages is rapidly progressing. In particular, travel for business and leisure between China and Japan is increasing at a rapid pace and with it the need for Japanese<–>Chinese translation.

History of NEC's automatic speech translation software research and development:

1999: automatic Japanese<->English translation software for notebook PCs
2002: PDA-operational Japanese<->English travel conversation, automatic speech translation software
2005: speech-to-speech translation software capable of being processed on low-power-consumption multi-core processors, optimal for small devices such as mobile phones
Although NEC's automatic speech translation software research has been focused on Japanese<->English translation to date, NEC has been able to realize Japanese<->Chinese speech translation software by installing a newly created large-scale Chinese language conversation speech corpus, a Chinese travel conversation text corpus, and an acoustic model and a language model that were developed based on both of these, in the compact, high speed speech recognition engine that NEC has been able to create owing to many years of research in this area.

NEC will continue to advance research of its speech recognition and language processing technologies toward the realization of a society where communication is possible anytime, anywhere.