In today’s globalized world we have the ability to communicate with people across the world. However, in many situations the language barrier still presents a major issue. For example, many foreign students coming to KIT to study are initially unable to follow a lecture in German. Therefore, we offer an automatic simultaneous interpretation service for students. To fulfill this task, we have developed a low-latency translation system that is adapted to lectures and covers several language pairs. While the switch from traditional Statistical Machine Translation to Neural Machine Translation (NMT) significantly improved performance, to integrate NMT into the speech translation framework required several adjustments. We have addressed the run-time constraints and different types of input. Furthermore, we utilized one-shot learning to easily add new topic-specific terms to the system. Besides better performance, NMT also enabled us increase our covered languages through multilingual NMT. % Combining these techniques, we are able to provide an adapted speech translation system for several European languages.

To attract foreign students is among the goals of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). One obstacle to achieving this goal is that lectures at KIT are usually held in German which many foreign students are not sufficiently proficient in, as, e.g., opposed to English. While the students from abroad are learning German during their stay at KIT, it is challenging to become proficient enough in it in order to follow a lecture. As a solution to this problem we offer our automatic simultaneous lecture translation. It translates German lectures into English in real time. While not as good as human interpreters, the system is available at a price that KIT can afford in order to offer it in potentially all lectures. In order to assess whether the quality of the system we have conducted a user study. In this paper we present this study, the way it was conducted and its results. The results indicate that the quality of the system has passed a threshold as to be able to support students in their studies. The study has helped to identify the most crucial weaknesses of the systems and has guided us which steps to take next.