IPA to English Conversion

Tips for IPA to English translation in speech analytics

Photo by Dmitry Demidov from Pexels

Often in Speech analysis, we need to translate IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) to English manually as there are not any translators online that able to help us do that.

Below are reasons why it can’t be done so easily:

1. IPA letters are merely a type of sound, it is unable to distinguish vocabulary that pronounces the same (homophones) but spell differently such as the word “New” and “Knew” which both sound as njuː
2. Different type of speakers produce a slightly different type of pronunciation and resulted in different IPA transcription

In short, the solution for translate IPA to English is a complicated process which needs the following characteristic:

• The Pronunciation system that links the pronounced sound to the text library
• The language system to determine which words are more suitable to be used in the phrase based on the prior context.

Sound familiar? It is actually 2 core components in the speech recognition system. By applying the concept, we can actually directly used the pronunciation generated by the IPA letters and translate it by building an advanced speech recognition system as the figure below: