From Speech-to-Speech Translation to Automatic Dubbing

WS 2020 · Marcello Federico, Robert Enyedi, Roberto Barra-Chicote, Ritwik Giri, Umut Isik, Arvindh Krishnaswamy, Hassan Sawaf ·

We present enhancements to a speech-to-speech translation pipeline in order to perform automatic dubbing. Our architecture features neural machine translation generating output of preferred length, prosodic alignment of the translation with the original speech segments, neural text-to-speech with fine tuning of the duration of each utterance, and, finally, audio rendering to enriches text-to-speech output with background noise and reverberation extracted from the original audio. We report on a subjective evaluation of automatic dubbing of excerpts of TED Talks from English into Italian, which measures the perceived naturalness of automatic dubbing and the relative importance of each proposed enhancement.