Quick lookup for speech translation

Abstract

Offered is a system that presents on a display screen a translation of a sentence together with an untranslated version of the sentence, and that can cause both of the displayed sentences to break apart into component parts in response to a simple user action, e.g., double-tapping on one of them. When the user selects (e.g., taps on) any portion of either version of the sentence, the system can identify a corresponding portion of the other version (in the other language). In some implementations, a user device can include both a microphone and a display screen, and an automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine can be used to transcribe the user's speech in one language (e.g., English) into text. The system can translate the resulting text into another language (e.g., Spanish) and display the translated text on the display screen along with the untranslated text. When a user selects a portion of a sentence, the system can also present information about the selected portion (e.g., a dictionary definition) and/or enable selection of a modification to the selected portion (e.g., a different one of the N-best results that were generated by a translation service or an automatic speech recognition (ASR) service).