from audio to text to translate?

Factual Questions
1

Hi. If there’s a way for a computer to translate text (albeit rather poorly) from one language to another and a way for a computer to capture text from audio, is there any software out there that captures audio in, say, German and then puts it into German text, then translates it into English text? … heck, then I guess it could read it too :cool:

2

In other words:

  1. Language A heard by computer and put into Text in Language A
  2. Text in Language A translated to Text in Language B
  3. Text in Language B read aloud by computer

It seems that each of these three steps already exists and is even available, on some level, for free (like text reading and translating).

My question is: has anybody put these three steps together so that I can get a near simultaneous audio translation of a lecture in another language? Would be cool, no? Been done? : )

3

It is an active area of research. Current results are horrible, though. Take the errors in speech recognition and errors in machine translation and multiply them, and that’s what it’s like.

I’ve been reading some documents transcribed and translated from Voice of America in Mandarin lately. It is a grueling experience.