Patent ID: 7734467

Claim:
A computer-implemented method for translation of a source language utterance of a first user, said source language utterance being in a source language, said first user being a speaker of said source language, said method comprising the steps of: performing automatic speech recognition on said source language utterance to obtain a speech recognition result corresponding to said source language utterance; performing machine translation on said speech recognition result to obtain a translation result in a target language; performing information retrieval on a supplemental database, based on said speech recognition result, to obtain multiple retrieved word strings, in said source language, related to said source language utterance, said retrieved word strings having word string translations in said target language associated therewith, said supplemental database comprising a parallel corpus with indexed training data including training word strings in said source language and corresponding translated training word strings in said target language, said step of performing said machine translation being carried out by a translation system trained on said training data of said parallel corpus, said performing of said information retrieval comprising: taking said speech recognition result as a query in a weighted combination; and searching said indexed training data based on said query; and formatting said speech recognition result and said retrieved word strings in said source language for display to facilitate an appropriate translation selection.