As one of the goals of this work was to rapidly develop a speech-to-speech translation system we also wished to account for the effort spent in building this system. Although the work took part over one calendar year, not everyone was working full time on the system during that period. In total there were 6 technical staff involved (the authors of this paper), each bringing their particular expertise. We estimate that in total there was about 2 person-years total effort from the senior staff. In addition to this there was also part-timer Croatian informants, chaplains and some student helpers. We also should note that some of the translation datra used to train the system was collect for a previous project.
Most of the basic systems that were used in development of this system already existed and this was basically a test of how well they perform on new data. However some problems with the tools were found and some new development was carried out. Interestingly it is the organization of data collection, scheduling translators and labellers that is actually one of the most time consuming parts.
If this technique were to be applied to some new language we believe less resources would be required, though we do not want to claim that each new language would be the same as the previous, and hence different possibly non-trivial problems may appear when moving these techniques to new languages.
This project shows how a relatively simple speech-to-speech translation system can be rapidly and successfully constructed using today's tools. The system was indeed constructed in less than one year. The results of the 2001 evaluation in Croatia indicated that, while the system was not ready for actual field use, it was actually impressively close to that level of performance, and worthy of further development to achieve that capability.