The language barrier is a major problem for today’s global communication. Existing technologies like automatic text translation as well as speech input/output can now be a seed for an innovative technology called speech-to-speech translation, where speech in a source language can be translated to speech in a target language.

Under the collaboration among 8 Asian countries; Thailand, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia, China, India, and Singapore, in the name “Asian Speech Translation Advance Research Consortium (A-STAR)”, a network-based speech translation system has been developed. The system facilitates people to talk to each other by using their own mother-tongue language. Member countries set up basic speech translation components including automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) for their own languages, and statistical machine translation (SMT) between their languages to English or others. The prototype Internet-based engine links web services of such basic components, forming a speech translator for 8 languages plus English.

Client applications can be in many forms such as voice-interfaced instant messengers with a translation service, and a peer-to-peer software that helps translation between two languages. Although the current system has been built particularly for the travel domain, modification to other domains requires only the development of a domain-specific database. This happens to be useful in many application areas e.g. tourism, multi-cultural communication, social networking, international conference and business.