Bemba Speech Translation: Exploring a Low-Resource African Language

Farouq, Muhammad Hazim Al, Wassie, Aman Kassahun, Moslem, Yasmin

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence 

This paper describes our system submission to the International Conference on Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT 2025), low-resource languages track, namely for Bemba-to-English speech translation. We built cascaded speech translation systems based on Whisper and NLLB-200, and employed data augmentation techniques, such as back-translation. We investigate the effect of using synthetic data and discuss our experimental setup.