Challenge: Existing speech-to-speech translation models either leverage text as an intermediate step or require hundreds of hours of parallel speech data.
Approach: They propose a framework for training textless S2ST models that require dozens of hours of parallel speech data.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves reasonable performance on three domains with single-speaker synthesized speech.

Similar Papers

Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation on Real Data (2022.naacl-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing text-based speech-to-speech translation systems rely on cascaded approach . text-to text translation systems require text generation and a single input to generate output .
Approach: They propose a textless speech-to-speech translation system that can translate speech from one language into another without the need of text data.
Outcome: The proposed system can translate speech from one language into another without text data.
Can We Achieve High-quality Direct Speech-to-Speech Translation without Parallel Speech Data? (2024.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing two-pass direct speech-to-speech translation models require parallel speech data to train, which is challenging to collect.
Approach: They propose a two-pass direct speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) model that decomposes the task into speech- to-text translation (s2TT) and text-tospech (TTS) they propose 'composer' S2ST model that integrates pretrained S2TT and TTS models into a direct S2 ST model.
Outcome: The proposed model integrates pretrained S2TT and TTS models into a direct S2ST model without parallel speech data.
Direct Speech-to-Speech Translation With Discrete Units (2022.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing direct speech-to-speech translation models rely on text generation as an intermediate step.
Approach: They propose a direct speech-to-speech translation model that translates speech from one language to another without relying on intermediate text generation.
Outcome: The proposed model produces 6.7 BLEUs in the Fisher Spanish-English dataset when trained without any text transcripts and with text supervision.
Speech-to-Speech Translation for a Real-world Unwritten Language (2023.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: a new study examines speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) that translates speech from one language into another . the research area for unwritten languages remains a research area with little exploration due to the lack of training data.
Approach: They propose a system that translates speech from one language into another . they use Taiwanese Hokkien as an example of an unwritten language .
Outcome: The proposed system can be used to train models in languages without standard writing systems.
Dub-S2ST: Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation for Seamless Dubbing (2025.findings-emnlp)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing speech translation approaches often overlook the transfer of speech patterns, leading to mismatches with source speech and limiting their suitability for dubbing applications.
Approach: They propose a diffusion-based speech-to-unit translation model with explicit duration control that enables time-aligned translation.
Outcome: The proposed system preserves key characteristics such as duration, speaker identity, and speaking speed while maintaining key characteristics.
Speech-to-Speech Translation with Discrete-Unit-Based Style Transfer (2024.acl-srw)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing methods to translate spoken utterances from one language to another are unable to preserve speaker timbre of source speech.
Approach: They propose a pipeline with style-transfer capability on the basis of self-supervised speech representations and codec units.
Outcome: The proposed model achieves zero-shot cross-lingual style transfer on previously unseen source languages.
Back Translation for Speech-to-text Translation Without Transcripts (2023.acl-long)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: End-to-end speech-totext translation (ST) is often achieved by utilizing source transcripts, but transcripts are only sometimes available since numerous unwritten languages exist worldwide.
Approach: They propose an algorithm to synthesize pseudo ST data from monolingual target data to enhance ST without generating source transcripts.
Outcome: The proposed method achieves an average boost of 2.3 BLEU on MuST-C En-De, En-Fr, and En-Es datasets.
Leveraging Unit Language Guidance to Advance Speech Modeling in Textless Speech-to-Speech Translation (2025.findings-acl)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Existing textless speech-to-speech translation models have two main challenges: 1) learning cross-modal features and 2) learning alignment of difference languages in long sequences.
Approach: They propose a unit language to overcome two main modeling challenges . they propose task prompt modeling to utilize the unit language in guiding the modeling process.
Outcome: The proposed language improves over a strong baseline and achieves comparable performance to models trained with text.
From Tens of Hours to Tens of Thousands: Scaling Back-Translation for Speech Recognition (2025.emnlp-main)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent advances in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) have been fueled by massive speech corpora, but extending coverage to diverse languages with limited resources remains a formidable challenge.
Approach: They propose a pipeline that converts large-scale text corpora into synthetic speech using off-the-shelf text-to-speech (TTS) models.
Outcome: The proposed pipeline generates 500,000 hours of synthetic speech in ten languages and achieves transcription error reductions of over 30%.
LibriS2S: A German-English Speech-to-Speech Translation Corpus (2022.lrec-1)

Copied to clipboard

Challenge: Recent advances in speech-to-text translation have led to significant improvements, but the availability of appropriate training data is limiting.
Approach: They propose a new text-to-speech and speech-tospech translation model that directly learns to generate the speech signal based on the pronunciation of the source language.
Outcome: The proposed model learns to generate speech signal based on pronunciation of source language.

What is GenGO?

GenGO is an NLP powered publication search system. It currenctly indexes 30k+ papers from ACL Anthology, and implements multi-aspect summarization, semantic search, and more!

Information

About
Limitations