Bridging Language Barriers: Exploring Hindi-to-English Speech-to-Speech Translation for Multilingual Communication

The increasing need for effective cross-lingual communication has highlighted the vital role of speech-to-speech (S2S) translation systems. These systems hold immense potential, particularly in multilingual countries like India, which boasts 22 official languages, with Hindi being the predominant one. This study is centered around the creation of a Hindi-to-English S2S translation model. Comprising three essential components—speech-to-text (STT), text translation, and text-to-speech (TTS) modules—the model’s development takes a structured approach. The STT module leverages CLSRIL-23 + Wav2Vec2, an innovative self-supervised learning technique developed by Facebook AI Research. Through pre-training on substantial amounts of unlabeled speech data, the model captures valuable speech representations, followed by fine-tuning to align with our specific requirements. The output text generated by the STT module undergoes subsequent processing using a transformer-based methodology, ensuring precise translation into English. The final phase involves TTS translation using the Tacotron 2 model. The outcome is an S2S translation model capable of directly producing the target speech (English) from the source language (Hindi). The model achieves an average Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 3.8, marking a significant advancement in bridging language barriers and facilitating effective multilingual communication.