Toward an Interagency Language Roundtable Based Assessment of Speech-to-Speech Translation Capabilities

We present observations from three exercises designed to map the effective listening and speaking skills of an operator of a speech-to-speech translation system S2S to the Interagency Language Roundtable ILR scale. Such a mapping is nontrivial, but will be useful for government and military decision makers in managing expectations of S2S technology. We observed domain-dependent S2S capabilities in the ILR range of Level 0 to Level 1, and interactive text-based machine translation in the Level 3 range.