About

What is multimodal translation?

Multimodal translation is an advanced form of communication and translation that integrates and interprets information from various sources, such as text, images, audio, and video, to convey a message accurately.

Simply put, it’s translating content across various types of media.

Why is multimodality important?

When translating information that is in different formats and media types, it’s hard to effectively grasp the context,
and truly understand the meaning behind them.

That’s where multimodal translation comes in handy. It helps in understanding the context correctly and translate them accurately
by using multiple modals like text, audio, video, etc… This technology is very important in systems where context awareness is required.

Types of multimodal translation:

Text-to-text: This is the simplest form where you can translate text from one language to another language.
Audio-to-text: Here the audio is transcribed and then translated also into several languages.
Audio-to-audio: May be implemented in the future. It’s the same concept as audio to text but the output remains in audio format.

Technology used:

Speech recognition: Important to recognize spoken language for interpretation and translation. Output can then be in text or audio format.

Limitations:

language support: Hard to support all languages, since every language has its own modal that has to be trained and installed into the application.
Maintaining context: The context may change across different media. So it’s a must to ensure the context remains correct.

Improvements:

As mentioned above, audio to audio will be implemented in the future. Other media types can also be implemented like videos and images.