news.bridge - Automated Transcription and Translation for News (2018)

Abstract: news.bridge provides a platform for multilingual video processing, including automated transcription and translation, subtitling, voice-over, and summarization, with post-editing facility of videos in a broad range of languages. The platform is currently in beta testing at Deutsche Welle for republishing of videos in other languages.

## the platform the news.bridge platform is a modular, dockerized system, developed by leta, which currently runs remotely, but can also be installed locally. it ingests content from the deutsche welle repository, processes (transcribes, translates) it on demand, after selecting specific items. as it is meant for use in the production department, it has a post-editing user interface, allowing corrections to be made to the translation and transcription. to widen the number of languages covered, it includes internal, customized translation services from universities as well as off-the-shelf services, such as google translate, ibm watson transcription and voiceover, via api. this combination leads to a tool that covers an extremely wide range of language combinations. over 100 languages are included. ## multilingual news production deutsche welle, as coordinator and user partner, is currently enhancing and testing the tool for production. it has run a few user evaluation workshops and more are planned. it envisages different use cases. the tool is used, for instance, for transcription of interviews in any of the languages covered by the system. it is being tested for reprocessing of dw videos (with existing transcripts) in several languages and is being evaluated for gain in time and effort. the use of existing transcripts is a major factor, as the error rate of transcription (e.g. names, missing punctuation) is much higher than that for translation. overall, initial evaluation results indicate that journalists welcome a tool that can help them produce videos cross-lingually. a high-quality transcript in one language is a solid basis for subtitling and voice-over into different languages. finding the best tools for each language pair is part of the benchmarking effort. pérez-ortiz, sánchez-martínez, esplà-gomis, popović, rico, martins, van den bogaert, forcada (eds.) proceedings of the 21st annual conference of the european association for machine translation, p. 369 alacant, spain, may 2018.