We present enhancements to a speech-to-speech translation pipeline in order to perform automatic dubbing. Our architecture features neural machine translation generating output of preferred length, prosodic alignment of the translation with the original speech segments, neural text-to-speech with fine tuning of the duration of each utterance, and, finally, audio rendering to enriches text-to-speech output with background noise and reverberation extracted from the original audio. We report and discuss results of a first subjective evaluation of automatic dubbing of excerpts of TED Talks from English into Italian, which measures the perceived naturalness of automatic dubbing and the relative importance of each proposed enhancement.

Neural machine translation models have shown to achieve high quality when trained and fed with well structured and punctuated input texts. Unfortunately, the latter condition is not met in spoken language translation, where the input is generated by an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. In this paper, we study how to adapt a strong NMT system to make it robust to typical ASR errors. As in our application scenarios transcripts might be post-edited by human experts, we propose adaptation strategies to train a single system that can translate either clean or noisy input with no supervision on the input type. Our experimental results on a public speech translation data set show that adapting a model on a significant amount of parallel data including ASR transcripts is beneficial with test data of the same type, but produces a small degradation when translating clean text. Adapting on both clean and noisy variants of the same data leads to the best results on both input types.