Chapter 10

Automatic speech translation in the classroom and lecture setting

With dramatic improvements in quality for the technologies underlying Speech Translation, e.g., Speech Recognition and Machine Translation, the potential viability of Speech Translation in certain scenarios may finally be within reach. This is no truer than in educational settings where, with ever-growing immigration and an increasingly global workforce, multilingual classrooms and educational settings have become the norm around the world rather than the exception. The problem is that many educational institutions are faced with the daunting challenge of meeting the needs of upwards of 30–100 language communities simultaneously. Scenarios include providing translated content or instruction to linguistically diverse student populations, often in the same classroom, and parent-educator interactions, sometimes individually but also often in group settings. In the former scenario, speech translation technology can be a bridge between the student’s home language and the dominant language used in the classroom and an aid for learning the dominant language. In the latter scenario, parents, unlike their children, may never achieve proficiency in the dominant language(s), yet still need to be involved in their children’s education. The technology can provide them access where otherwise there may be none, or where the options may be severely limited. The large-scale multilingual requirements of these immigrant and diverse communities when interacting with educators generally defies reliable human-centric solutions and begs for technological ones.