English

RosettaSpeech: Zero-Shot Speech-to-Speech Translation without Parallel Speech

Audio and Speech Processing 2026-02-17 v2 Computation and Language Machine Learning

Abstract

End-to-end speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) systems typically struggle with a critical data bottleneck: the scarcity of parallel speech-to-speech corpora. To overcome this, we introduce RosettaSpeech, a novel zero-shot framework trained exclusively on monolingual speech-text data augmented by machine translation supervision. Unlike prior works that rely on complex cascaded pseudo-labeling, our approach strategically utilizes text as a semantic bridge during training to synthesize translation targets, thereby eliminating the need for parallel speech pairs while maintaining a direct, end-to-end inference pipeline. Empirical evaluations on the CVSS-C benchmark demonstrate that RosettaSpeech achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot performance, surpassing leading baselines by significant margins - achieving ASR-BLEU scores of 25.17 for German-to-English (+27% relative gain) and 29.86 for Spanish-to-English (+14%). Crucially, our model effectively preserves the source speaker's voice without ever seeing paired speech data. We further analyze the impact of data scaling and demonstrate the model's capability in many-to-one translation, offering a scalable solution for extending high-quality S2ST to "text-rich, speech-poor" languages.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.20974,
  title  = {RosettaSpeech: Zero-Shot Speech-to-Speech Translation without Parallel Speech},
  author = {Zhisheng Zheng and Xiaohang Sun and Tuan Dinh and Abhishek Yanamandra and Abhinav Jain and Zhu Liu and Sunil Hadap and Vimal Bhat and Manoj Aggarwal and Gerard Medioni and David Harwath},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.20974},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

12 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:55:24.421Z