An Experimental Study On Accuracy Of Machine Speech Translation

The process of globalization has promoted the rapid development of the interpreting industry,and the update and iteration of science and technology have also brought subversive changes to the interpreting industry.Interpreting plays an indispensable role in cross-language communication.The machine speech translation softwares are updating constantly and the functions of them are becoming more powerful.More and more people think machine speech translation will eventually replace human interpreters.In order to objectively explore the accuracy of machine speech translation,the author studies the accuracy of two representative machine speech translation softwares through experiments.This paper selects two representative machine speech translation softwares,Tencent Translation and Sogou Translation,both of which recently took the crown of Chinese-English translation project in the Workshop on Machine Translation.And this paper selects 52 passages in the speech made by Premier Li Keqiang after the end of the Fifth Session of the 13 th National People’s Congress as the corpora.Firstly,this paper divides the result of accuracy of machine speech translation into two spheres: speech input aspect and interpretation output aspect,and studies them respectively.The experiment shows that the accuracy of speech input of the two softwares are 97.2% for Tencent and98.3% for Sogou respectively.In terms of interpretation output,there are similar problems found in both softwares,such as incorrect expression of culture-loaded words,incorrect use of grammar and confusion of syntactic structure.As a result,the accuracy of interpretation is: 74.4% in Tencent and 78.3% in Sogou;This paper finds that the high accuracy of speech input is not directly related to the output quality of the interpretation.In addition,this paper further compares the accuracy of interpretation between softwares and the human interpreter according to the experimental results,and finds that the accuracy of human interpreter is 95.7%,which is much higher than that of machine speech translation.According to the research results,this paper further summarizes the limitations and advantages of machine speech translation,as well as those of the human interpreter.To promote the positive development of the interpreting industry,this paper also gives some suggestions on the improvement and efficient utilization of machine speech translation software.