Summary
We describe the construction and use of a laboratory facility for testing the performance of speech-to-speech translation devices. Approximately 1500 English phrases from various military domains were recorded as spoken by each of 30 male and 12 female English speakers with variation in speaker accent, for a total of approximately 60,000 phrases available for experimentation. We describe an initial experiment using the facility which shows the impact of environmental noise and speaker variability on phrase recognition accuracy for two commercially available oneway speech-to-speech translation devices configured for English-to-Arabic.